Chapter 53
Saint
Victor arrives on campus on a Tuesday.
I know before Zero tells me. I know because the energy around Amy changes that morning.
The way she carries herself when something old has surfaced, the slight hollowing around her eyes when the past finds a way back into the present.
She sits in the back of the lecture hall instead of the middle.
She checks the door three times. She holds her pen so tightly that the cap cracks.
She doesn’t tell me, and I know she won’t, to protect me.
It’s also because Amy protects people from the weight of things she considers her own problem, which is one of the consequences of surviving a childhood where asking for help produced worse outcomes than managing alone.
She has been doing it her whole life. She will probably do it for the rest of her life.
The difference now is that I’m in her life, which means her problems are mine, which means Victor has made the significant tactical error of crossing into what I consider mine.
Zero sends me the footage at noon. Victor is at the campus gate, talking to the security desk.
He came prepared.
Good, I think. So did I.
Valen pulled a comprehensive record of everything the Mancini family prefers to keep quiet.
Roman’s history with Amy is in that file.
All of it. The part where he took her from her father’s house when she was fifteen.
The part where he used the things she confided in him against her.
The part the file describes in its careful, sanitized language as an ongoing coercive relationship that ended when the subject enrolled in higher education.
The subject.
As if she is a case number.
I have been patient because patience is one of the few things that years in a white room gave me that functions as a skill rather than a symptom.
I have been patient, and I have been watching, and I have been waiting for Victor to make another move that would bring him here.
Because I knew he wouldn’t let it go. Victor is strategic, but he doesn’t know what he’s up against.
I find him at four in the afternoon.
He is outside the east academic building, leaning against the wall near the main entrance with his hands in his coat pockets, watching the door.
He is tall. Good-looking in the way that certain men are good-looking when they have money and confidence, and nothing has ever hurt them enough to leave a visible mark.
I walk up beside him.
He adjusts his coat.
He turns. He looks up at me. He takes in my size, my face, like it’s his first time seeing me, and something shifts in his expression.
“I knew you would come back,” I say.
He looks at me for a moment. “Wrong answer.”
He straightens. Whatever he sees in my face makes him straighten. He is not a coward. I will give him that. He meets my eyes, and he does not look away. “Whatever power you think you have here because of the sons is not enough leverage, Saint. She’s Prey, whether you like it or not.”
“Is that what you think?”
That lands. The straightening becomes something else, of a man who has just understood that this conversation is not going where he planned.
“I think you made the mistake in coming for her.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“The last person who is going to ask you nicely before you die,” I say.
He makes the mistake of laughing. This is the moment I have been patient for.
What happens next is not quick. Quick would be efficient, and efficiency is not the point. The point is comprehensive. The point is that Victor leaves this campus with a permanent and detailed understanding of the consequences of returning.
I walk him around the side of the building where the cameras have been on a Zero-managed loop for the past four hours, and I take my time.
He fights. Of course, he does. Victor is not small, and he is not untrained. He makes a genuine effort, which I respect in the abstract, the way you respect something that is going to fail.
His first swing catches my jaw, and I feel it, but I don’t stop moving. I block the second swing and use his momentum to send him into the wall.
I break his nose with the heel of my hand, which produces a sound like a snapped branch, and the blood darkens the front of his expensive coat.
He goes down to one knee. He is breathing hard.
He is looking up at me with an expression of a man who has finally, for the first time in his life, met a consequence.
I crouch down to his level.
“She was fifteen,” I say, my voice very even. “You knew what you were doing. You knew what her father did to her, and you used it, and you planned to take what wasn’t yours, and you called it a scholarship. And you want to make sure she understood the cost.”
He spits blood. “She didn’t have a choice.”
I hit him again. Not the nose this time. The jaw. I feel teeth shift under the impact. And then again and again until he chokes on his own blood.
I stand.
I watch him on the ground in the gray afternoon light, and I think about a girl at my home who waits for me.
Who used to wait for the floor above to go quiet before she showers.
Who presses her ear to the door before she opens it.
Who holds her pen until the cap cracks when something from the past walks back through the gates of a place that was supposed to be safe.
I can’t recognize his face. I let out the rage inside. For her.
I look at my hands. I breathe through the thing in my chest that is not quite settled yet, the residue of the rage when it has been given something real to do and is coming down from it.
Then I wash my hands at the service tap.
I go back inside.
When I make it home, I go upstairs. She looks at my face and places her book on the nightstand. She looks at my hands. Her eyes are very still. “Victor came back,” she says. It isn’t a question.
I nod. “Yes.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she steps back from the door.
I reach for my phone, ignoring the sting in my hands, and call Azriel.
“Clean it up.”