Chapter 24
Amy
Rose finds me at lunch with the expression she gets when she has information she is deciding how to deliver.
She sits across from me. She sets her tray down and looks up.
“You look different,” she says.
“I feel different,” I say, truthfully.
She nods slowly, studying me. “Good different or complicated different?”
“Both,” I say. “In that order.”
She picks up her fork. “Garret came to find me this morning,” she says in the unembellished tone of someone reporting a weather event, the emotion managed somewhere she has put it for later. I think she mentioned that he watches her, but I know there’s more to it.
I look up. “The mysterious one.”
She nods.
“Is he a threat?” I ask.
“I genuinely cannot tell,” she says. “And that is the most unsettling part.”
I think about what I know of Garret. Very little. His name circulates on campus, arriving in conversations like the weather, unavoidable and atmospheric. Wealthy. Valen’s world, which means Kenyan’s world, which means nothing is simple and nothing is what it appears to be.
“Ask Azriel,” I say.
She’s been going to tutoring sessions with him at the library.
She looks at me. “He doesn’t say much.”
“He might if you ask the right question,” I say.
I stop.
Rose watches me stop. “What question?”
“Prey,” I say carefully.
She’s quiet for a moment. “You know about Prey?”
“I know enough,” I say.
We eat in silence for a while.
Then she says, quietly, without looking at me. “Does he know you know?”
I think about the library. About a conversation in a quad in the dark. About a note on a pillow.
“Maybe,” I deflect. “Which is not the same thing as all of it.”
“Is that enough?”
I think about that honestly. “I’m not sure, but for now,” I say.
She nods again. She understands that, for now, it is not a yes-or-no answer, but the only answer that is true and survivable at the same time.
We finish lunch.
At the door, she stops and turns back. “Amy.”
I look up.
“Be careful with the parts of yourself you give to someone,” she says. “Make sure you can find them again afterward.” And with that, she leaves.
I stand in the doorway of the dining hall in the cold autumn light, and I think about what she said, and I think about the parts of myself I have already given, and I think I’m not afraid of the dark the way I was.
I think that might be exactly what she is warning me about.
I go to my afternoon class.
But I can’t not think about it for the rest of the day.
Azriel finds me at four thirty near the south fountain.
He materializes the way he always does, without a visible approach, which I have started to understand is a skill rather than an accident. He falls into step beside me, and for a moment, we just walk.
“I heard about what happened with the second year from the south dorm,” I say.
He’s quiet. “How?”
“Around campus,” I say, “the campus hears everything within forty-eight hours.”
He exhales. “She was not physically harmed.”
Azriel stops walking.
I stop.
He looks at me with the careful expression that means he is deciding how much of what he knows I am ready for. I have learned to interrupt when I see it happening.
“Tell me what I actually need to know,” I say.
It wasn’t a secret. She’s Prey, and like everything around here, they cover it up. And I’m still trying to figure out why he’s telling me all this. At first, I thought it was because Rose was looking out for me, but it’s not. Because he showed up before. It’s something else.
Something moves in his face. It’s reluctance, and underneath it, something that looks like relief. Like a person who has been managing information alone for a long time and has just been given permission to put some of it down.
“There is a new angle. That’s all I can say,” he says. “And be careful with Saint. He is not who you think he is. Don’t provoke him.”
My stomach drops.
The cold settles around us. The fountain is drained, sitting in its empty basin.
“How do I not provoke him?” I ask.
Azriel shakes his head slowly. “Saint doesn’t get provoked. Saint decides what he will do, then does it, and afterward calls it something else. The risk is not that it will make him lose control. The risk is that someone will get hurt, and the response will be the catalyst for who he really is.”
I look at Azriel.
He is looking back at me with the expression I have seen before, the one that is more than protective duty. The one that has its own history and its own weight and that I have been carefully, respectfully, honestly not engaging with because it would be dishonest to engage with it now.
“Azriel—”
“Saint is hunting you,” he interrupts before I can finish. He says it with the dignity of someone who has already had the conversation in his own head and arrived at the answer before I have said a word. He’s warning me, but why?”
“I don’t think…” I trail off.
He shakes his head. “Don’t think. Just…be careful. With him. He is not a simple, Amy.”
“Why are you warning me?”
“Because I like you, Amy.”
Before I can respond, he turns and walks back across the quad.
I watch him go and think about what he said. About whether I’m afraid of him liking me or if this is part of a game.
But I’m not afraid.
That is either the bravest thing I have ever realized or the most dangerous.
Saint is not hunting me. He’s protecting me. He has to be.