Someone listened to me cry.
Not the polite, helpless kind of listening where people pretend they can’t hear but feel too awkward to knock. This was something else.
The note says so plainly, in a handwriting that doesn’t shake, doesn’t hesitate. Whoever wrote this wasn’t rattled by what they heard. They were fascinated.
Some of us are very good at handling monsters. And some of us...prefer them already broken.
I read it six more times after I picked it back up. The ink is dark. Deliberate. The letters are wide and unhurried, the kind of handwriting that belongs to someone who has never been in arush for anything because they know they’ll get what they want regardless.
S.
One letter. And somehow it’s the most terrifying thing on the page.
After another hour, I cave and pick it up.
I fold it along its original crease and tuck it into the inner pocket of my bag. I don’t know why I take it with me. I don’t know why I don’t take it straight to campus security.
Except that I do know, and the reason sits in my stomach like swallowed glass. Whoever wrote this already knows things about me that no scholarship application, no carefully curated story I’ve ever told anyone contains.
I didn’t imagine it. They know what I sound like at three in the morning when the nightmares pull me under and I can’t stay quiet.
They know I’m trying to hide something since I got here.
And they didn’t run.
They didn’t call for anyone.
They stayed and listened.
The lecture hall for Introduction to Behavioral Psychology is cavernous in a way that feels personal, as if the room itself is designed to make you feel small.
Tiered seating rises in wide arcs above a polished wood lectern, the windows running floor to ceiling on the east wall, flooding everything in the gray morning light. It smells like old paper and central heating and the faint cedar of someone’s expensive cologne.
I take a seat near the middle, not the front. Front rows invite attention. Middle rows are camouflage.
I get my notebook out. I date the page. I wait for the familiarity of routine to smooth out the jagged edges of this morning.
It doesn’t.
Because something is wrong with the room. The air is charged with something heavy. I can’t name it right away.
I think it’s just my nerves, the residue of last night still clinging to me. Then I think it’s the note folded in my bag; its presence like a splinter I keep pressing. But it’s neither of those things. It’s something I can only describe as pressure.
A weight in the air that wasn’t here yesterday, the same way a room changes when a window that’s been shut for years is finally opened.
Something has entered this space.
I don’t look for it.
That’s the thing about Prey—and I hate that word now, hate that the man from the courtyard put it in my head, hate that the note has stitched it to my skin, but the instinct isn’t to look. The instinct is to make yourself smaller. To stare at the notebook. To keep writing the date over and over until your hand steadies.
I write the date three times.
And then Professor Harlan walks in, and the lecture begins.
I try very hard to pay attention to the neurological underpinnings of obsessive thought patterns. Of course. Because apparently the universe has a sense of humor and it hates me.
I take good notes…I always take thorough notes.
