After class, someone is going to tell me the full truth. Why have Azriel and Saint targeted me and not someone else? Then, I think, what if this is how they have all Prey. The economics girl. Rose. How many others?
I want the truth. Every word of it. Not the version that keeps me manageable. Not the partial, protective, carefree version that Azriel has been dispensing in measured doses since the first day.
All of it.
I find Saint between classes in the narrow hallway behind the lecture theater, the one that the students don’t use because it smells of old stone and pipe condensation and has no natural light.
He sees me coming from twenty feet away, and something shifts in his face, not alarm, but of a man understanding immediately that what is approaching is a storm.
I stop in front of him.
I take the envelope out of my bag and hold it out.
He looks at it. He looks at me.
He takes it.
I watch him while he reads. He is very controlled. Saint is always controlled, the stillness is his native state—but I have learned to read the small things, the tells that exist below the level of expression he manages.
The slight tightening along his jaw. The way his thumb presses flat against the paper.
He knew.
I can see it in the absence of surprise. He knew about the list, the selection process, and the family connection index. He knew what it meant and what it was designed to find.
He hands it back.
“How long?” I ask.
”From before you arrived,” he says like it’s nothing.
The cold in my chest gets sharper. “You knew before I got here.”
“Yes.”
“And Azriel?”
He holds my gaze. “Yes.”
I nod. The nod is not acceptance. It is processing the way I have always processed the worst information, by going very still and very internal while the outside stays functional.
“Were you assigned to hunt me?” I ask.
Something moves in his face. “No.”
“Then what?”
He is quiet for a long moment. The kind of quiet that is not evasion. I know his silences now, I can read the difference, but the kind that means he is deciding how to be honest about something that does not have a clean, honest shape.
“I was in a cell for the criminally insane when the list was compiled,” he says. “I was not part of the selection. I was not assigned. I knew about you from the list Azriel showed me. You were already real to me before you were here. What I did when you arrived was not an assignment. It was a choice.”
I look at him.
The rage mixed with fear in my chest does something complicated. It doesn’t go away. I’m not going to let it go away, not yet, not until I have sat with it properly and understood what it is telling me. But it shifts slightly. Makes room for something else.
“That doesn’t fix it,” I say.
“No,” he says. “It doesn’t.”
