A partial list of attendees. And at the bottom, almost as an afterthought:
...the Vikiar family, represented as always by multiple members, was notably without their youngest son, who sources indicate is currently enrolled in an alternative academic program at the university’s discretion.
Alternative academic program.
I read it four times. I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why it makes the hair on my arms stand up.
My phone buzzes.
Unknown number. One message.
Unknown: Don’t open your window tonight.
— S
I stare at it for a long time.
Then I get up, walk to my window, and lock it. I pull out the card for campus security, but I put it away. If I attract attention, it might not be the kind I’m looking for.
I need to lie low.
For now.
Because as much as I have to be careful in here, Roman is out there.
Sleep doesn’t come, but I don’t expect it to.
I lie in the dark with my phone on my chest and my window locked and the card Azriel gave me on the nightstand, and I listen to the building.
Kenyan’s oldest dormitory, all the orientation materials say so with a kind of pride that I now find vaguely sinister, and it settles and creaks in a constant low conversation with itself. Pipes. Wind in the stone. The distant sound of someone’s music two floors up.
And then, at some point after two in the morning, something else.
Footsteps in the hallway.
Not the random scatter of a late-night return. Not the urgent shuffle of someone heading to the bathroom. These are deliberate.
Measured.
The footsteps of someone who isn’t trying to be quiet because they don’t need to be…Because they’re the thing that makes other things quiet.
They stop outside my door.
I don’t breathe.
One second. Two. Five.
Nothing.
No knock. No envelope. No sound at all.
And then the footsteps move on, slow and unhurried, and I hear the stairwell door at the end of the hallway open and close.
I lie in the dark for another hour, heart in my throat, trying to decide whether what I felt standing outside my door was my imagination or something I have no clean word for yet.
Something that felt—and this is the part I will not say out loud to another living person—like being checked on.
Like someone making sure I was still there.
