Chapter 1
Amy
Iknow something is wrong the moment I step through the gate. It starts in my gut, that low frequency that fires before the mind has language for it.
An internal alarm that says whatever this place is, it’s not what it appears to be.
Kenyan University doesn’t feel like a campus. It feels like something preserved.
The buildings stretch upward in cold gray stone, their windows tall and narrow as if designed for surveillance rather than light. Ivy climbs the walls in thick, dark veins, suffocating the architecture rather than adorning it.
Even the air feels different, too clean, too controlled. The kind of air money buys. The kind of place where the rich send their children to secure generational wealth.
Not long ago, they began admitting scholarship students too.
I shift the strap of my bag higher on my shoulder and walk deeper into the courtyard. My boots ring against the stone. Students move past in clusters, voices low and polished, coats expensive.
They don’t stare openly. But I feel it all the same, that quiet, collective recognition. As if this place and its people already know something about me that I don’t.
I check my paperwork. Two words rise from the page.
Scholarship student.
Back home, that meant survival. Here it feels like a label pressed into my skin.
A category.
A reminder of exactly who I am and who I’m not.
I stop near the central fountain and grip my bag strap, steadying my breathing. My thumb finds the cracked seam in the leather and I dig.
Once.
Twice.
Hard enough that the edge bites beneath my nail.
Then I do it again.
You’re fine, Amy. You got out. You made it here. They can’t touch you now.
But the thought won’t settle. Because leaving New York hadn’t felt like freedom. It had felt like running, and I’d only been given a head start.
A flash of lightning splits the sky so suddenly I nearly stagger. The air thickens, humid, cold, and heavy.
And then his voice is in my ear, clear as if he were standing behind me.
Low. Controlled. Angry.
“You think you can just leave?”
I drag myself back into the present. Cold stone underfoot. Cold air in my lungs.
“You look lost.”
The voice comes from directly behind me, and I turn too fast, unprepared for how close he is.
He’s been there the entire time, I can tell by his stillness. Tall. Dark coat. Shoulder-length curls. Expression unreadable. His honey-colored eyes settle on me, cold and assessing.
“I’m fine,” I say. Too quickly.
The man is massive, not performatively, but structurally, the way people are when their bodies were built for a purpose.
His gaze moves over my worn boots, cheap bag, the tension locked in my shoulders. Something flickers in his eyes. Recognition. And then something colder.
“First day,” he says.
It’s obvious. I nod anyway.
His mouth curves slightly. “You’ll learn.”
“Learn what?”
He tilts his head as if I’ve said something interesting. “How things work here.”
A chill moves up my spine.
Before I can respond, he steps past me as if I was never worth stopping for.
But as he passes, he leans just close enough that I feel his breath graze my ear. “Try not to run.” A pause. “The best part of being Prey is the chase.”
And then he keeps walking.
He doesn’t look back.
I stand at the fountain and stare after him.
Prey.
He’s messing with me. It’s obvious I’m not from here.
I tell myself that and almost believe it. Except the word lodges somewhere under my sternum and stays there, and underneath it, a darker thought surfaces.
What if this place won’t keep me safe?
The first few days pass in a blur of polished syllabi and careful silences.
Some students wear labels I recognize from magazines in waiting rooms. Others wear things I’ve seen on discount racks.
The mix is both wider and stranger than I expected, voices from the East Coast, the South, the West, some flavored with old money’s brand of etiquette.
Apart from the man at the fountain and the low-grade awareness of being watched, this is the part I dreamed of. Different people. Different languages. The ordinary symphony of a campus at the start of term.
Professors explain the readings and the deadlines are unforgiving, but I lean into all of it gratefully. Into the structure, the task, and the clean architecture of expectation. Work has always been the one thing I could do without apology. It asks nothing of me but focus.
But underneath the routines, the hum persists. Every unfamiliar face, every casual glance, carries weight I can’t put down. Not because I’m a stranger. It’s normal. Every campus has strangers at the start of the term.
It’s the label. The invisible asterisk next to my name: no money, no family, no one who would make noise if something went wrong.
The few things I do have came through him.
Roman Mancini.
The man I ran from. The man with the power to make things and people disappear.
As the sun drops below the tree line and the campus settles into shadow, the stone buildings taking on the quality of a Gothic film set, I retreat to my dorm room and try to read.
The room is sparse and impersonal. I haven’t let myself make it mine.
Making it mine would mean believing I get to stay, but one thing I find odd is that I don’t have a roommate.
On the third morning, I find my dorm room unlocked.
I stand in the hallway with my key still pinched between my fingers, staring at the knob as if it might explain itself.
I know I locked it. I remember the click.
I remember checking it once, then turning back from the stairs to check it again because old habits don’t care that I’m hundreds of miles from home.
Inside, nothing looks untouched.
My books are stacked exactly where I left them. My suitcase is still under the bed. My sweater hangs over the desk chair with one sleeve dragging against the floor.
I hold my breath until I open the closet.
Empty.
At night, the memories come anyway. My father’s voice. His hands. His eventual absence, and then Roman’s presence filling the space where safety was supposed to be.
I had run to Roman once I met him at fifteen because running to him felt less dangerous than staying at home with my father.
I’d been wrong.
Sleep offers even less. It’s a battlefield. I bolt awake most nights in a cold sweat, heart hammering, the phantom residue of fear clinging to my skin.
I’ve learned to wait for the floor above to go quiet before I shower. The noise from outside to dissipate. I press my ear to the door. I time my movements around the building’s rhythms so no one sees what I’ve been hiding since I was twelve.
The architecture of damage my father left on my body, preserved cautiously beneath long sleeves.
This morning is no different. I’m waiting for the hallway to empty when I notice it.
A piece of paper on the floor. Folded. Slid under the door with enough precision to suggest it was deliberate.
I pick it up with shaking fingers.
You cried out for someone who never came.
That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
Not the fear.
Not the pain.
But the silence that followed.
You were taught that no one would answer you.
That no matter how loud you screamed, you’d still be alone.
Most people would be disturbed by it.
I wasn’t.
I listened.
Every sound. Every breath you tried to swallow.
And now I can’t decide what I like more, the way you tried to stay quiet, or the moment you couldn’t.
Some of us are very good at handling monsters.
And some of us prefer them already broken.
— S
The note slips from my fingers.
Someone was outside my door. They listened. They waited.
And when it was over, they didn’t knock or call for help or do any of the things a normal person would do.
They wrote it down.
And slid it under the door like a gift.