The room gets quiet. Even the porn on TV seems to freeze.
Colton’s voice is calm, almost clinical. “They want you to ‘sponsor’ her integration. Which means what? Show her around? Protect her if she’s threatened, but otherwise hands off. How the fuck is that tradition?”
“It’s all about the Hunt,” I say, and everyone nods. The Hunt is the only real rule here, the only law that matters. Come Hunt night, all bets are off.
Julian leans forward, serious for once. “You gonna take her, Bam?”
“Maybe,” I say. I feel the old itch, the one that starts in my spine and spreads outward. The urge to dominate, to claim, to rip down whatever wall someone thinks is bulletproof.
Rhett’s eyes narrow. “If you do, make it clean. We don’t need a war.”
I shrug. “She’s just a girl. All that mafia shit is smoke.”
Rhett laughs. “You’re an idiot.”
I grin back. “I know.”
There’s a lull. Colton gets up and grabs a beer. I can smell blood on my hands—real or remembered, I don’t know. I stare at my knuckles, at the white lines that never fade, and think about what it would feel like to wrap them around her throat. Not to kill, just to show her that even the Don’s princess has needs beyond being a prissy little fuck.
“Want to bet who gets to her first?” Julian says, breaking the tension. “Bet I could fuck her before you do.”
Colton snorts. “You wouldn’t last a round.”
Julian points. “That sounds like a challenge.”
Rhett just watches me. “Bam doesn’t lose,” he says. “That’s why he’s still here.”
I don’t answer. I stand, stretch, and grab a fresh beer from the mini-fridge. My body feels restless, electric. I need to hit something, or fuck something, or both. The other guys keep talking, but their words are background noise now. I hear only the rhythm of my own pulse, heavy and steady.
On the wall, the porn keeps playing, bodies locked and writhing. I picture her face on all of them, just for a second, and the image is enough to send a spike of adrenaline through my chest.
This is what I am. Not a friend, not a sponsor, not a fucking chaperone. I’m the wolf they let out when the sheep need culling.
Tomorrow, I’ll find her. Tomorrow, I’ll start the game.
Tonight, I’ll dream about what her blood tastes like.
My room is black except for the monitors. Four of them, side by side, blue glow bright. I keep the heat off even in winter. Cold makes you faster, keeps the blood from getting lazy.
I crack my knuckles and start tapping.
Westpoint’s security grid is a joke. The only people who ever break it are us or the Board, and the Board pretends they never do. I know every subroutine in the system, every admin password, every lazy shortcut the IT guys have ever made. What they don’t know is the Feral Boys maintain their own shadow network—Colton’s doing, but I’m the guru of the group. He just broke the system enough for me to take over and write our own code.
I skip the student dorms, skip the staff offices. I go straight to the private suites—where they park the high-value assets. Where they put her.
There’s a firewall, tougher than last year. I blink twice, then slip through it. The feed from her floor is encrypted, but only on three of the cameras. The rest are old, analog, never upgraded. I patch the gaps with a script Colton wrote for me last winter break. Easy.
The first screen shows her bedroom. Dahlia is standing by the bed, coat draped over a chair, long hair down. She’s not what I expected in private—her posture’s looser, shoulders not so tight. She pulls open a suitcase and starts lining up her clothes on the bed, all black, all labeled. She’s a control freak. I like that.
She moves to the closet, walking it like a soldier surveying a new base. She runs a hand over the hanger rod, fingers careful. She checks the door twice, then starts hanging her jackets. For every three things she hangs, she stops and checks her phone. No social, just texts. She deletes them all right after reading.
I can’t see her face in the side view, but I know the type. Always on alert, always gaming out the next play. If she thinks she’s safe in here, she’s dumber than she looks.
The second screen is the bathroom. She spends a long time there, arranging little bottles of perfume and shampoo on the counter. She sets up a toothbrush, rinses it, then rinses it again. Nervous habit. Or maybe she doesn’t trust the water.
When she’s done, she sits on the closed toilet and stares at the wall for a good ten minutes. Not moving. Just sitting. I rewind and watch it again. It’s not a freeze. It’s a meditation.
On the third screen, the living room, she lines up family photos on the nightstand. Parents. A sister. None of her alone. She spends a lot of time with the picture of her father, fingers tracing the glass. She presses her thumb to his face, then sets it back down. Some kind of ritual, or maybe she misses him. I don’t know what that feels like. I don’t think I care.
