Page 7 of Prey

Dominic eats slowly, watching the table. Theon refills his own water glass twice. Raphael and Darius argue in low voices about whether what’s in the pan constitutes a proper braise or something else entirely, and the argument has no heat in it, just the comfortable friction of two people who’ve had this exact disagreement in thirty different kitchens over thirteen years.

Raphael prods the pan with a fork, unconvinced. “I’ll say it one more time. This is not a braise.”

“It’s a braise.”

“A braise has liquid. This has—” Raphael gestures at the pan, searching for it. “—ambition.”

“Ambition is a flavor,” Darius says serenely.

The argument has no heat in it, simply the comfortable friction of two people who’ve had this exact disagreement in many kitchens over the years.

Damon tears bread apart with his hands and says nothing. But his shoulders have dropped two inches from where they were in the meeting room. I notice because I always notice.

Ezra finishes first, as usual, and doesn’t immediately reach for his phone. He sits with his hands around his wine glass and looks at the middle of the table with the particular expression he gets when he’s not calculating—unfocused, almost young. It doesn’t last long. But it’s there.

I eat, watch them, and don’t say much.

This is the thing I never planned for when I was fifteen years old, mapping out security rotations in my head and telling myself survival was the only metric that mattered. I didn’t plan for the table. For the argument about braising technique. For Lucien stealing Dominic’s bread and Dominic noticingimmediately and saying nothing. For the way Marcus finally stopped tapping his fingers twenty minutes ago and hasn’t started again.

They made us into weapons, and somehow out of that we built this.

I don’t have a word for what this is. I’ve never needed one.

What I know is that every name still on my list is another version of the same threat—not just to me, but to this table, these people, this specific and unlikely thing we’ve made between us. And to whatever children are in a van tonight, chosen for the same reasons we were, headed for similar rooms. That part I keep to myself. The list was never about revenge—revenge is too small a word, and it doesn’t unmake anything that was done. It’s about the next nine. It always has been.

That’s enough. That will always be enough.

3

JENNA

Iwake up all at once, no drift, no warmth of slow consciousness. One second: nothing. The next: ceiling, walls, door, window. My eyes do the circuit before the rest of me catches up.

2:17 PM. The light through the blackout curtain is wrong for morning anyway, bleeding around the edges in that flat, directionless way that means afternoon. I work nights, sleep days. Fewer people. Shorter lines. Most of the city is operating on a different clock than me.

I sit up and put my feet on the floor.

The apartment is studio-sized, cheaper than anything in this neighborhood has a right to be. The discount comes from the location—back corner, second floor, the unit that shares a wall with the laundry room. Previous tenants hated the vibration. I liked it immediately.

I did the rest myself. Furniture from a single trip to a thrift store three blocks over: one bed frame with a mattress, one table, two chairs. Nothing decorative. Nothing that would require a second trip to move. The kitchen holds exactly what I need. I’ve lived here for four months, and it still looks like someone just moved in.

The window has a secondary lock I fitted myself, plus a wedge alarm on the inside sill. The front door has a chain I added and a doorstop wedged under the handle when I sleep. Neither would stop someone who really wanted in. They’d slow them down enough that I’d hear it. That’s all I need. Time.

I stand, roll my shoulders, and check my hands automatically. The knuckles of my right hand are bruised from Thursday’s training session at the fight club I joined. I flex them once, feel the pull and give of healing tissue, and move to the kitchen to fill a glass of water.

The morning check takes forty seconds. Door: chain on, wedge in place. Window above the sink: locked, alarm armed, the strip of tape I replace every week still unbroken across the gap between sash and frame. I’ve done it so many times the sequence lives in my hands rather than my head.

My stepfather used to lock doors too. The difference is I lock mine to keep people out.

The go-bag under the bed holds three days of supplies, a change of clothes, two prepaid phones, and $600 in cash split between two envelopes. The second bag lives behind the water heater access panel in the bathroom. I know their weight by feel. Nothing is missing. Nothing is shifted.

I’ve kept go-bags like this since I was seventeen. Since the night I left my stepfather in that basement with a fire poker through his gut. I made the choice. I didn’t stay to find out if I’d killed him or just broken him. I took the cash from his wallet and stuffed a few belongings into a bag, and I walked fifteen miles to a truck stop before the sun came up.

Three years and four cities later, I still don’t know if I killed him or broke him. There’s no version of looking it up that doesn’t put me back on a grid he could find me on, so I don’t look. I assume he survived. I assume he’s looking. I assume the police might be looking too—for me, not for him, because that’s howit usually goes with the kind of man my stepfather was and the kind of girl I was at seventeen.

Three things to be afraid of. The man, his memory, and the law. I live the way you live when all three are after you.

The not-knowing is the heaviest part.