Page 12 of Prey

I’ve watched a lot of people move through cities. Hundreds, probably, if I’m running honest numbers. I know the difference between someone who varies their appearance out of habit and someone who does it because not doing so has cost them. Jenna does it just like I maintain perimeter checks on every room I sleep in.

She moves against the morning crowd, and I give her the distance she’s earned again. Sixty meters. She deserves sixty meters.

I don’t examine why I feel that way. She takes an early left. I adjust my course without breaking pace.

She adds seven minutes to a forty-minute walk. I timed her route on day three and then walked it myself at four in the morning.

I’m already inside a doorway.

The thing I keep noticing is that she’s not afraid—not exactly. The checks aren’t frantic, the variations aren’t desperate; they’re worn smooth with repetition, and there’s a difference between someone who lives in fear and someone who has metabolized caution into a second skeleton.

I know what it costs to build a reflex like that—what has to be done to a person before checking the exits becomes as automatic as breathing. Nobody is born watching the doors. Someone teaches you, and they are never gentle about the lesson.

She makes the third block turn, and I stay on the parallel street, tracking by sound and geometry.

I should pull back.

I don’t.

She stops at her building’s side entrance.

I’m already gone—parallel street, thirty seconds ahead of her arrival, positioned where I can watch the stairwell window without being visible from street level. It’s a reflex, not a decision. The same way breathing is a reflex.

She pauses in the stairwell. I can see the shape of her through the glass, utterly still, listening. Most people don’t know how to be still. They fidget, shift weight, check their phones. She stands like someone who learned stillness from necessity and holds it for a full eight seconds before moving up.

I count the seconds.

I should be gone. The observation window closed when she entered the building. There’s nothing operationally useful happening in a stairwell.

I stay another four minutes.

The curtain on the third floor moves—just the edge of it, just a fraction—and I know she’s checking the street. I’m already in a doorway. She won’t see me. She never truly has.

But she’slooking.

Most targets go passive once they’re inside. The door closes, and the vigilance closes with it. She keeps it running even when she’s home, even when every lock is engaged, even when there’s nothing to find.

I know this because I do the same thing.

Forcing myself to turn away, I walk north. And yet, she’s still in my head—the eight seconds of stillness in the stairwell, the curtain.

Three blocks north and I’m still seeing her.

Not the file version. Not the tactical version—routes, locks, pharmacy schedule. The other version. The one that came out of the staff door with her hair loose down her back. The slope of her neck. The way her mouth moved when she spoke to her coworkers, polite and tired and a little bit beautiful in a way that had no business being any of my concern.

Christ.

I run my tongue along the back of my teeth and keep walking.

I’ve taken hundreds of people.Hundreds.I’ve watched them eat, sleep, fuck, cry into their phones in parked cars. I’ve seen so many faces and bodies and movement patterns until they reduce down to data—angles, vulnerabilities, windows. None of themregisterpast the operational layer.

This one is registering.

Jenna is registering.

I cut across the street with the light, hands in my jacket pockets, and the part of my brain that’s supposed to be running cold is running warm instead. Warmer than it should.

Hundreds. I’ve takenhundreds.