Chapter 13
Amy
What I learned from Azriel over lunch is that some people affiliated with certain campus organizations occasionally take an interest in scholarship students.
This interest is not always benevolent. I should be cautious about accepting invitations from people I don’t know.
I should vary my routine. I should not be alone in low-traffic areas after five.
What Azriel doesn’t tell me is anything that would actually explain why. Anything that would tell me what “take an interest” means. Anything about his family, his name on the chapel plaque, and the Order referenced in the archived article. He gives me the map with half the landmarks removed.
I eat my lunch. I nod, and I think this is what it looks like when someone is protecting you from information that they think you can’t handle.
When they are trying to be your friend when you look vulnerable.
It’s not uncommon. Kind of like when you start a new school, and someone decides to be nice and warn you of the shit that can go down.
Who to talk to. Who to stay away from. Except this isn’t a bunch of bullies beating up the new kid. This is different.
I’ve been protected this way before. I know exactly how it ends.
“And Saint?” I ask.
Azriel goes still but not dramatically. He’s very good at composure, but the kind that is itself a tell. The pause before the careful answer.
“Stay away from him,” he says.
“Why?”
“He’s… He’s not safe.”
“Safe like the campus organizations who take an interest in scholarship students? Or a different kind of not safe?”
Azriel looks at me with something in his expression that I can only read as reluctant respect.
“A different kind,” he says. “He’s not going to—” He stops, then starts again.
“He won’t hurt you in the ways you might think.
But he will change things. He changes everything he touches.
And it’s not the kind you would want or need. ”
“How do you know what I need?”
“I know more about your situation than you realize,” he says quietly.
The words land with weight. I furrow my brows. “What does that mean?”
He meets my eyes. And for a second, just a second, I see the thing behind his composure, not threat, not pity. Something that looks almost like guilt. “It means you should trust me. And it means that whatever Saint has done to get your attention, you should file it away and leave it there.”
“He sat behind me in class,” I say. “He’s a student. It’s not uncommon for someone in the same class to sit next to you.”
“He’s many things,” Azriel says. “Student is the most recent one.”
He pays for his coffee and leaves before I can ask what that means.
I sit with my half-eaten sandwich and the afternoon light coming through the west windows, and I think about a man in a hoodie who ducked through a doorframe and sat directly behind me and said accurate like it was a verdict.
I think about the footsteps in the hallway.
I think about my locked window.
I think about the nightmare that didn’t come.
And I think about the fact that I have walked, in my life, from one dangerous man directly to another, that I have a documented history of mistaking intensity for care, possession for protection, obsession for love, and that I am supposed to be smarter now, supposed to have the vocabulary for it, supposed to recognize the pattern before I’m already inside it.
I know the pattern.
I know it in my body the same way my body knows about exits and the direction of threats.
I know what it feels like when someone’s attention on you is a symptom of their pathology rather than a genuine feeling.
But then, and this is the part I sit with for a long time in the thinning afternoon light, I think about what accurate felt like.
Roman never once made me feel seen. He made me feel claimed. There’s a difference. He looked at me and saw territory. He saw a thing to organize his control around.
I close my eyes.
The memory of that voice, close and low, one word:
Accurate.
I open my eyes. I pick up my bag. I go back to my dorm room, and I sit on the floor.
I open my laptop, and I start building the chart I always build when I can’t make sense of something. A clean grid—information I know in one column, information I don’t know in another, and the space between them the map I’m trying to read.
One column: Azriel Vikiar. Family money. Tells partial truths. Wants to protect me from something he won’t name. Feels like genuine concern, not possession. Good looking.
Other column: Saint. No last name offered.
New to campus but not new to the campus, the alternative program reference, the way he moved through the lecture hall like someone returning to a known space.
Sits behind me. Maybe sends texts from unknown numbers.
Maybe writes me notes and stands by my door in the dark.
Intimidating. Mysterious. Gorgeous. Makes my heart speed up.
In the space between them: whatever is happening at this school. Whatever the campus organizations are doing with scholarship students.
I stare at the chart for a long time.
Then I add a third column.
What I feel. Afraid. Hyperalert. Exhausted. Interested.
Which is the most dangerous item on the list, and the one I can’t cross out.
Thursday comes fast.
My last class ends at five forty-five. I have nowhere I need to be until dinner service opens at seven. It’s the gap in my schedule that I usually spend in the library, but the library closes at five thirty now. There’s a note on the door about reduced hours during the fall.
I consider going back to my room. The route from the academic building to my dormitory cuts through the main quad, which at six in the evening is mostly empty.
The students who eat early are already in the dining hall, while those who eat late are somewhere else—maybe the bar Babylon across the street or still in their rooms.
I’ve walked it every day since I arrived.
I walk it now.
My bag on my shoulder, my hands in my pockets, the cold air sharp with the smell of rain. The floodlights on the quad have come on in the early dark, throwing long shadows between them.
I’m halfway across when I hear it.
Not footsteps but something subtler. A shift of air that happens when someone steps out of a shadow that was too still for too long.
“Amy.”
The voice is behind me, and I don’t recognize it. That’s the first thing I register. Not Azriel. Not Saint. Someone else, and the way he says my name, like he’s confirming a detail on a list, makes every instinct I have come online at once.
I turn.
He’s attractive. Icy-blue eyes that can freeze any girl into place. Tall. Lean. Built the way the sons of wealthy, powerful men are sometimes built with the confidence of someone who’s never had to earn room. Good coat. Expensive shoes but the wrong choice of footwear for this campus in autumn.
And I don’t like his smile.
“I don’t know you,” I say.
“You will now,” he says easily. “My name is Victor. I’m part of the program that sponsors your scholarship.” He takes a step forward. “I wanted to introduce myself personally. The program likes to check in with its recipients.”
Every alarm in my body is screaming.
I take a step back. “I’m late.”
“I won’t keep you long.” His smile doesn’t change, and its unchanging nature is the worst thing. “I just wanted to make sure you know that the program is very invested in you. Very invested. And that investment comes with expectations.”
I take another step back. My heel catches on an uneven stone, but I right myself.
“I think I should—”
“Don’t.”
The voice comes from behind Victor.
Victor goes still.
I look past him.
Saint stands at the edge of the light, twenty feet away, hands in his pockets. Tall. Black hoodie over his impressively large frame. He’s not moving. He doesn’t look angry, which is somehow worse than if he did.
He looks the way a person looks when they’ve already decided how something ends and are just waiting for it to get there.
“Walk away,” he says to Victor. Very quietly.
Victor turns. And I watch, with clinical fascination, the moment when Victor Sokolov registers that Saint is a threat.
He goes pale.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But the color leaves his face in the way it leaves the faces of people who know exactly what they’re looking at.
“And you’re supposed to be—” Victor starts.
“Indoors?” Saint says. “Yes. I get restless.”
Victor looks at him, confused, for another two seconds. Then he looks at me. And whatever he sees in that look, whatever calculation he’s running about the cost and benefit of whatever Saint means to him, resolves quickly.
He straightens his coat. “I’ll see you around, Amy. Maybe get some coffee before class?” He doesn’t wait for a response before he walks away.
He doesn’t run because men like Victor don’t run, but his pace is not casual.
I stand in the middle of the quad with my heart hammering. Saint walks toward me until he’s close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look at him, and the floodlight is behind him, so his face is in shadow. I ask, “Were you following me?”
“Yes,” he says.
“How long have you been following me?”
“As long as it’s needed.”
I stare at him. “That’s not—”
“Safe,” he says. “I know. None of this is safe. But that”—he tilts his head in the direction Victor walked—“that was less safe. And I was in the area.”
“For how long?” I ask. “Have you been in the area?”
Something moves in his face. Not quite an expression, something before the decision to arrange your features into one thing or another. “A while,” he says.
We stand in the cold floodlight, and I breathe, and it seems like he doesn’t.
Or if he does, I can’t see it. And I should say “stay away from me.” I should say “I’ve been here before, and I know how this goes.
” I should call security, but what would that do?
I think it would take at least ten guards to handle Saint.
Instead, I ask, “What did he want?”
Saint looks at me, and for the first time since he sat behind me in a classroom and said one word against my back, I see something in his face that isn’t calculation or patience or of someone managing their own interior motives.
I see something that looks like someone trying to decide how much truth a person can take at once.
“Tell me,” I press.
“Stay away from guys like Victor.”
“Do you fall into the same category as Victor?”
He drags his gaze over my face. “Does it look like I fall in the same category?”
Tiny chills run across my arms as I take in his size and handsomeness. The intense gaze I find fascinating when it’s aimed at me. “I don’t know.”
“You’ll find out soon.” And he walks away.