He nods. He is gracious about it, which I appreciate. He turns and walks back the other way and does not make it weird.
I look at Saint. He looks back at me.
“You were supposed to let me answer.”
“I know,” he says.
“You cannot appear around corners every time a man asks for my number and not let me respond.”
“I was not appearing,” he says. “I was walking. He happened to be asking.”
I stare at him. His expression is completely level, but his eyes give him away. A quality I have learned that Saint is managing—something he finds very difficult to be reasonable about.
“Saint.”
“Amy,” he says back, in the same tone.
I look at him for a long moment. Then I step forward, and I fist his hoodie, and I tug until he bends his head down to my level, and I put my mouth against his jaw, not his mouth, his jaw, the sharp line of it. And I feel him go very still.
“I’m here,” I say, against his jaw. “I’m not giving anyone my number. I’m here with you.”
His hand comes up and covers mine, where I’m fisting the black fabric. His grip is tight.
“I know that, and I’m not letting you go,” he says. His voice is lower than usual.
“Then act like it,” I say.
I let go of his hoodie and go inside.
He stands in the hallway for a long moment. Then he follows me in.
That night, he is not on the roof or running the perimeter. He is in the room, his back against the headboard, and my back against his chest and his arms around me, and we stay like that for a long time in the quiet dark, and I feel his heartbeat under my palm, and I think about the word love.
I’m not afraid of it.
I have not been afraid of it for a long time.
But I’m not sure Saint understands the meaning behind it.
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 withAmy 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.
