Page 4 of Prey

“Theon.”

“Statistically,” Ezra begins.

“Ezra, I swear to God.”

The SUV goes quiet for about four seconds. Then Marcus’s shoulders start shaking again, silent and rhythmic, and Theon turns to look out the window with the stillness of a man suppressing a laugh through sheer force of will.

I look at Weiss. Then at the back of Marcus’s headrest. Then at the city sliding past in the dark.

This is what it looks like from the outside, I think. Four men in a stolen SUV with a sedated logistics coordinator in the backseat, bickering about cats and GIFs. Back at base, Damon is already prepping a room. Darius is sending GIFs. Dominic is doing God knows what. Lucien is waiting with that particular stillness of his that you stop trying to read after knowing him long enough.

Nine people were handed over to a program before they were old enough to understand what was being taken from them.

We didn’t choose each other. That’s the thing people get wrong about family. You don’t choose them. They’re the ones still standing when everything else burns down, and you’re too stubborn and too broken and too goddamn used to each other to imagine any other arrangement.

Fucked up. All of us. In our own personal ways that a psychologist would write papers about.

But they’re mine.

2

NIKOLAI

We pull into the loading bay twenty minutes later.

The building used to be a cold storage facility—six floors of concrete and rusted steel piping, sitting on a block the city forgot to redevelop. From the outside, it looks abandoned. Boards on the upper windows. A chain-link perimeter with lock and hazard signage. The kind of place people cross the street to avoid.

Marcus keys the gate code without looking, and the bay door grinds upward on its track, slow and mechanical, loud enough that I feel it in my back teeth.

Inside, the air is different. Cooler, and carrying the familiar undercurrent of machine oil and recycled ventilation. The overhead fluorescents flicker once as we roll past the threshold—they always do, a quirk in the wiring that nobody’s bothered to fix because at some point it stopped being a fault and started being how you know you’re home.

The ramp to sublevel two is at the far end of the bay. Marcus takes it without being directed.

Down here, the building becomes entirely different. Ezra rebuilt most of the infrastructure himself over three years, pulling cable through walls that had once insulated frozen meatand turning them into a functional space. There are actual walls now instead of industrial shelving. Separate rooms. A medical bay that Theon keeps cleaner than the rest of the building combined. A server room that hums day and night. A common area with a couch that sags on the left side because Dominic falls asleep on it every time he comes off a long job.

It’s not pretty. It’s never been pretty.

But I know every corridor by the sound it makes under my boots. I know which lights take three seconds to warm up and which door in the east hall sticks in winter. I know that the ventilation on sublevel three ticks at irregular intervals after midnight and used to wake me up until it became background noise.

Marcus rolls to a stop near the freight elevator and cuts the engine.

I climb out. Stretch my neck once, left then right.

Behind me, Theon opens the rear door and checks Weiss’s pulse with two fingers. “Still good,” he says.

The elevator doors open. Raphael leans against the frame with his arms crossed, watching me.

The conference room is on sublevel two, east corridor, third door on the left. I know everyone’s already there before I push the door open because the ventilation in this hallway carries sound better than it should.

I’m right.

Dominic sits at the far end of the table, watching me come in.

Theon takes the seat closest to the door and spreads his notes across the table. Handwritten, dense, molecular structures sketched in the margins. He opens his notebook, closes it, opens it again.

Lucien is already leaning back in his chair near the middle of the table. He has a cut above his eyebrow closed with a butterfly strip and bruising along his jaw, and he looks like he clawed hisway back from the wrong side of a fight, which probably means he did. He catches me looking and shrugs with one shoulder

Damon and Darius come in together two minutes after us. Darius moves past him into the room, and his gaze sweeps the table once, unhurried, reading everyone before a single word gets spoken. His mouth pulls at one corner when his eyes land on the dried blood on Lucien’s collar. “Rough night?”