Chapter 7
Amy
The note is still on the floor where I dropped it.
I haven’t moved it.
I haven’t touched it again.
I just stand at the edge of my dorm room in yesterday’s clothes, staring at it the way you stare at a thing you know is going to change everything.
My alarm went off seventeen minutes ago, and I haven’t turned it off. I just let it scream until it gave out because that felt like the appropriate soundtrack for this moment.
Someone was outside my door.
Someone listened to me cry.
Not the polite, helpless kind of listening where people pretend they can’t hear but feel too awkward to knock. This was something else.
The note says so plainly, in a handwriting that doesn’t shake, doesn’t hesitate. Whoever wrote this wasn’t rattled by what they heard. They were fascinated.
Some of us are very good at handling monsters. And some of us...prefer them already broken.
I read it six more times after I picked it back up. The ink is dark. Deliberate. The letters are wide and unhurried, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who has never been in a rush for anything because they know they’ll get what they want regardless.
S.
One letter. And somehow it’s the most terrifying thing on the page.
After another hour, I cave and pick it up.
I fold it along its original crease and tuck it into the inner pocket of my bag. I don’t know why I take it with me. I don’t know why I don’t take it straight to campus security.
Except that I do know, and the reason sits in my stomach like swallowed glass. Whoever wrote this already knows things about me that no scholarship application, no carefully curated story I’ve ever told anyone contains.
I didn’t imagine it. They know what I sound like at three in the morning when the nightmares pull me under and I can’t stay quiet.
They know I’m trying to hide something since I got here.
And they didn’t run.
They didn’t call for anyone.
They stayed and listened.
The lecture hall for Introduction to Behavioral Psychology is cavernous in a way that feels personal, as if the room itself is designed to make you feel small.
Tiered seating rises in wide arcs above a polished wood lectern, the windows running floor to ceiling on the east wall, flooding everything in the gray morning light. It smells like old paper and central heating and the faint cedar of someone’s expensive cologne.
I take a seat near the middle, not the front. Front rows invite attention. Middle rows are camouflage.
I get my notebook out. I date the page. I wait for the familiarity of routine to smooth out the jagged edges of this morning.
It doesn’t.
Because something is wrong with the room. The air is charged with something heavy. I can’t name it right away.
I think it’s just my nerves, the residue of last night still clinging to me. Then I think it’s the note folded in my bag; its presence like a splinter I keep pressing. But it’s neither of those things. It’s something I can only describe as pressure.
A weight in the air that wasn’t here yesterday, the same way a room changes when a window that’s been shut for years is finally opened.
Something has entered this space.
I don’t look for it.
That’s the thing about Prey—and I hate that word now, hate that the man from the courtyard put it in my head, hate that the note has stitched it to my skin, but the instinct isn’t to look.
The instinct is to make yourself smaller.
To stare at the notebook. To keep writing the date over and over until your hand steadies.
I write the date three times.
And then Professor Harlan walks in, and the lecture begins.
I try very hard to pay attention to the neurological underpinnings of obsessive thought patterns. Of course. Because apparently the universe has a sense of humor and it hates me.
I take good notes…I always take thorough notes.
I’ve always been able to disappear into the task. Into the work. When everything else is unraveling, the act of writing things down is the only thing that feels honest.
I’m twenty minutes into the lecture when I feel it. Not a sound. Not a movement. A directed warmth of being watched. Not the casual, sweeping glance of a room full of half-awake students. Something fixed. Something that has found its target and settled.
My pen slows on the page.
Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look.
I look.
The back row is where the shadows pool deepest in this room, where the tiered seating rises high enough that the ceiling lights don’t quite reach.
Most of the students back there are slumped in their chairs, hoods up, some with coffee cups balanced on the corner of their desks.
But not the one in the far corner.
He’s too still for the room. Too awake. Too present in the way that only certain kinds of people are. He’s big, the kind of broad-shouldered, heavy-frame man that makes the standard university chair look structurally inadequate.
Dark hoodie.
No coffee.
No notebook.
I can’t see his face from where I sit.
But I can feel his eyes on me.
After a few seconds, he moves toward the light out from the shadow. Our eyes meet for less than a second before I snap mine back to the front, my heart hammering so hard I’m certain the girl sitting two seats over can hear it.
My face is hot.
My hand is shaking on the pen.
It’s him.
The guy from the courtyard.
Yesterday, that seat was empty.
The day before and every day since I arrived.
But today it isn’t.
I stare at Professor Harlan’s slides and tell myself I didn’t notice because I wasn’t paying attention.
I don’t remember because I was too focused on the note.
I tell myself I’m hypervigilant and pattern-seeking because of my history, because Dr. Osei, back in New York, told me my nervous system doesn’t know the difference between past danger and present safety, and that I’m probably catastrophizing again.
But my body doesn’t believe any of it.
After class, I move fast.
I don’t linger at the door, check my phone, or do any of the things normal people do when a lecture ends.
I pull my bag onto my shoulder, and I go, cutting through the stream of students heading for the exits, aiming for the side door that lets out onto the smaller courtyard.
The air outside is cold and clean.
I stop against the stone wall and breathe it in.
“You walk like someone’s chasing you.”
I pause and turn.
But it’s not him, the guy from the back row. It’s the one all the girls whispered about on my first day.
He doesn’t go unnoticed with his designer hoodie and gorgeous face. He’s leaning against the wall two feet away, arms crossed, eyes carrying a knowing expression.
Up close, he’s even more beautiful. And there is something about him that makes me believe he doesn’t believe it.
“Azriel,” he says, before I can ask. “We haven’t been formally introduced.”
I stare at him for a second too long.
Something moves behind his eyes fast, like a fish turning in dark water. “Why the rush? Not that the best part of running is being chased.” He pushes off the wall, straightening to his full height.
I step back.
“It was a warning, not a threat.”
“Those feel like the same thing,” I reply.
“Only if you don’t know which one to be afraid of.”
I tighten my grip on my bag strap. “Why are you talking to me?”
He looks at me for a long moment. The look isn’t predatory. It’s something more complicated than that, something careful, almost reluctant, like a man choosing his words in a room full of landmines.
“You should stay away from the back of lecture halls,” he says finally. “Sit closer to the front. Closer to the exits. Closer to other people.”
My stomach drops. “Why?”
He doesn’t answer. He just looks at me with those careful, guarded eyes, and then he pulls something from his jacket pocket and holds it out.
It’s a small card. Campus security extension, written in pen on the back.
“Keep it,” he says.
I take it with two fingers, almost reluctantly. Then he walks away without another word.
And I stand in the cold courtyard with a card with a security number in one hand and a note in my bag, trying to figure out whether the man who just left was trying to protect me or simply wanted me to know I needed protecting.