Page 93 of Prey

He kisses me tenderly, his hands stroking my hair. “Sometimes we have to face the monsters to realize we’ve already slain them.”

He carries me back to a leather couch, settling me on my back before pushing inside me again. This time there’s no urgency, no violence—just gentle connection as he fills the space his absence left behind.

“Stay right here,” he murmurs, his forehead against mine. “Let me just… stay.”

We lie connected, his weight pressing me into the padding. The silence stretches, comfortable now instead of tense. His breathing gradually slows, but his body language tells me he’s not relaxed. My eyes find his in concern.

“What is it?” I smooth my hands over his shoulders.

He’s been quiet for so long, I think he won’t answer. When he finally speaks, his voice is barely a whisper.

“My first hunt. I was seven.”

My heart clenches. I don’t speak, don’t move, afraid any interruption will make him stop.

“They brought in another kid. Younger than me. Maybe five.” His hands tighten on my hips. “Told me if I could catch him in the maze, I’d get extra food. If I couldn’t…” He shudders. “They’d put me back in the dark room.”

I stroke his hair, offering what comfort I can while he’s still buried inside me.

“He was crying. Scared. Kept calling for his mama.” Nikolai’s voice breaks slightly. “But I was so hungry, Jenna. I’d been in isolation for weeks. I just wanted the food.”

“You were just a child,” I whisper.

“I caught him at the dead end. He looked up at me with these huge brown eyes, still crying.” His breathing becomes ragged. “And when I brought him back to the handlers, they praised me. Called me their little hunter. Gave me chocolate.”

Tears slide down my cheeks for the boy he was, for the innocence they stole.

“I ate that chocolate while they dragged him away screaming.” His whole body trembles now. “And you know what the worst part is? I felt proud. For a moment, I felt like I’d won something.”

For a long moment I can’t speak. The boy he’s describing isn’t a monster. He’s a child who was handed a monster’s choice before he was old enough to spell his own name.

“Who were they?” My voice barely works. “Who does that, Nik? Who puts a seven-year-old in a maze and calls it a hunt?”

He goes so still I feel it everywhere we’re joined.

“You really want to know.” It isn’t a question. It’s a warning.

“I want all of it.”

His breath leaves him slow. When he speaks again the words come flat, recited, like he’s reading them off a wall he’s stared at his whole life.

“There was a program. A facility. I don’t know how old I was when they took me—too young to keep anything from before. No mother’s face. No name that was mine. Just a number, and the dark room, and the first time anyone was ever kind to me was the day I learned to hurt someone smaller.” His jaw works. “That’s how it’s built. They take you young because young things are more pliable. Starve you, freeze you, leave you in the black so long you forget the sun ever existed—then they open one door. Food. Warmth. A hand on your head telling you you’re good. You’d do anything for that door. Anything they demanded.”

“And they asked you to hunt,” I whisper.

“They tell you that you willbecomea hunter.” His mind is somewhere far away, somewhere I can’t follow. “They taught us to read and to kill out of the same books. Where a body breaks. How long a person lasts. To us it was just—school. We didn’t know other children learned anything else. By the time you’re old enough to ask why, the why is already part of you. I don’t know how to be anything else. They take any semblance of who you could be and twist it until you can’t remember being anything else. They don’t just make killers, they make soldiers.”

I think of his mask. Of the way he moved through the trees after me, patient, certain, made for it. Of how many times Icalled him a monster in my own head. My stomach turns over—not at him. At them.

“Us,” I say. “You keep saying us. Do you still know some of the other boys?”

Something shifts in his face, the only soft thing in the whole confession.

“Marcus. Darius. Ezra. Every man I’d die for came out of the same place.” His arm tightens around me. “We didn’t meet on the outside. We were forged in the dark together, and we got out of it the same way. It’s the one thing they never planned for. They built us to be weapons that couldn’t love. So we learned that from each other, where they couldn’t see. Turned the only people who understood the dark into the only family any of us has ever had.”

“Nik.” I cup his face, forcing him to look at me. “You survived. That’s all you did—survive.”

“They broke me so young I don’t even remember who I was before.” His expression is rife with devastation. “Sometimes I wonder if there was ever anything human in me to begin with, or if I’ve always been a weapon.”