Page 17 of Prey

I want to hear the sound she’d make. Whether she’d fight or whether she would go still and quiet exactly how prey does when it realizes the chase is over. Whether those eyes would water and she’d keep them on mine anyway, that same relentless awareness turned inward, turned on me.

The pressure crests faster than I expect.

I cup my free hand in front, catch the first of it—hot and slick across my palm—jaw locked against the sound that wants to come out. My hips jerk once, involuntarily, it is a loss of control I don’t allow myself, and I grit my teeth together, eyes fixed on the slow rise of her chest.

She doesn’t know.

I want her to know. That’s the part I can’t rationalize away. The urge to let it go, to paint my cum across her jacket or her throat or her face, to leave something of myself on her before she ever opens her eyes—it’s there, specific and ugly and sharp as anything.

I don’t.

I hold everything in my cupped palm instead, breathing through my nose, the ache draining out of me one stuttering pulse at a time.

The room goes quiet.

My heart rate is up—I notice it clinically: elevated respiration, the particular looseness in my shoulders that follows.

I look at my hand, then at her.

She’s exactly as I left her—chest rising, hair across the pillow, mouth soft.

I stand there another moment, my pulse still elevated for reasons I don’t examine.

Then I leave, the door locking behind me with a sound like a vault sealing shut.

7

JENNA

Concrete. Climate control. The flat, processed quality of air that’s been scrubbed through filters. Not the stale radiator heat of my apartment or the chemical overlay of the pharmacy or even the funk of whatever basement my stepfather used to?—

I halt that thought.

My eyes open. White ceiling. LED panel set flush with the tile, is an industrial fixture. Expensive.

Not my apartment.

The adrenaline hits my bloodstream like ice water.

I sit up too fast and my head swims, vision graying at the edges. My hand flies to my neck automatically—checking for ligature marks, for swelling, for the ache that means hands or a cord or?—

Nothing.

I’m dressed with my jacket still on, and boots laced. No immediate pain beyond the dull throb behind my eyes that feels pharmaceutical rather than traumatic.

The room is eight by ten, maybe. Concrete walls painted institutional white. The bed—if you can call it that—is a built-in platform with a thin mattress. There’s a toilet and sinkcombination unit in the corner. Stainless steel. The kind that can’t be broken into weapons. A camera dome in the ceiling corner, black and reflective.

The door has no handle on this side, and the realization makes my lungs constrict.

I swing my legs off the bed and stand, steadying myself against the wall until the dizziness passes. I check my pockets. Empty. Phone gone. Keys gone. The small folding knife I keep clipped inside my waistband—gone.

I look at the camera.

My stepfather couldn’t afford this. Whatever the fuck he did to me in that basement when I was fourteen—cable ties and a space heater and his brand of casual violence—it wasn’t sophisticated. It was opportunity and rage and the control that comes from being physically stronger than someone who can’t leave.

This is different: Planned. Funded. Professional.

Someone built this. Someone knew exactly what they were doing when they took me.