Page 13 of Prey

I’ve never wanted to know what one of them smelled like up close.

I exhale, slow, through my teeth.

This is a problem.

Not the kind of problem I report to Ezra. Not the kind Raphael needs to find out about over dinner, because he’d never stop, and Theon would chemically dissect it for sport. This is a problem I should bury, walk away from, and pretend doesn’t have a pulse.

I pull out my phone and text Ezra.

Run the model. I’ve got a new target I’m going to take tomorrow.

I type it out and send it before I can think about it.

5

JENNA

Iwalk home the long way. Not because I want to—my feet are done, the ball of my left heel rubbing raw inside my sneaker—but because I clocked a gray sedan idling near the pharmacy’s rear entrance twice in the last week. Different days, different times. Probably nothing. Delivery drivers use that block, but my paranoia dictates everything I do.

The neighborhood is doing its morning shuffle: a man walking a bulldog that wants to go a different direction, a woman in scrubs speed-walking toward the bus stop with coffee in a travel mug that’s seen better days. I move through them all, and no one looks at me twice. That’s the goal.

My paycheck clears today. I checked at the end of my shift, and refreshed the app in the pharmacy bathroom while the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. Two thousand, one hundred and fourteen dollars. Enough to get to Portland and put a deposit down on a small studio. Maybe further is better, somewhere that isn’t a city at all.

I’ve been thinking about Denver. Mountains will make it harder for him to ever find me.

The building door, then the lock behind me, then the stairwell. I pause on the landing and listen.

Nothing. Just the distant thrum of a television through somebody’s wall, a unit up and to the right, which would be 2C, which means Mr.Alvarez is having one of his insomniac mornings again. Normal. All of it is normal.

Third floor. My door.

I check the tape strip before I touch the handle. It’s still there, transparent and angled across the gap between door and frame at knee height, exactly where I put it before I left. I check the secondary strip up at the top corner.

Intact.

Inside, I run through my mental checklist. Window locks: both engaged. The thin piece of thread I loop across the bathroom cabinet is still tied. The books stacked on the kitchen chair angled to face the front door: undisturbed, spines flush against each other.

My go-bags sit at the foot of the bed. I crouch down and unzip the first one just far enough to see the orange marker I keep tucked inside the front pouch.

Still there.

I sit back on the edge of the mattress and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. Four months. I’ve been here four months, which is two months past my own limit, and the whole thing has been fine with no incidents.

The silver Camry from yesterday morning was probably just a Camry.

I strip off my jacket and lie back in my clothes, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looks like a dog running.

My brain wants to keep pulling at the threads and the feeling that’s been sitting wrong in my chest for days. I keep reaching for it and coming up with nothing concrete, and nothing concrete means I’m projecting. It means I’ve been doing this long enough that my nervous system throws up ghosts just to stay in practice.

I’m tired. I’m past tired—that hollow, scraped-out place behind my eyes where rest should be. The paycheck cleared. I’ll book something tonight, after I sleep. Somewhere with mountains.

I close my eyes. The dog on the ceiling disappears. The low hum of the city comes through the glass and I breathe out slowly, allowing my shoulders to drop.

Sleep comes, but it’s a fitful sleep—the kind where your body knows something your brain won’t admit. I keep surfacing, catching fragments. My stepfather’s hands. A door that won’t lock no matter how many times I throw the bolt. I’m back in the basement and the light under the door illuminates and I know he’s standing on the other side of it.

I jerk awake.

Ceiling. Water stain dog. My apartment.