Page 30 of Rage
Whether Azriel gives me shit about it or not.
I don’t do this because the Order asked me to. I don’t do it because Valen’s plan requires it.
I do it because somewhere between a photograph that looked almost like her face and the sound of her trying not to cry through a dormitory door, the unresolved thing I’ve carried for years finally found its shape.
And it looks like her.
I will burn this campus to the ground before Victor Sokolov puts his hands on it.
Amy
What I learned from Azriel over lunch is that some people affiliated with certain campus organizations occasionally take an interest in scholarship students. This interest is not always benevolent. I should be cautious about accepting invitations from people I don’t know. I should vary my routine. I should not be alone in low-traffic areas after five.
What Azriel doesn’t tell me is anything that would actually explain why. Anything that would tell me what “take an interest” means. Anything about his family, his name on the chapel plaque, and the Order referenced in the archived article. He gives me the map with half the landmarks removed.
I eat my lunch. I nod, and I think this is what it looks like when someone is protecting you from information that they think you can’t handle. When they are trying to be your friend when you look vulnerable. It’s not uncommon. Kind of like when you start a new school, and someone decides to be nice and warn you of the shit that can go down. Who to talk to. Who to stay away from. Except this isn’t a bunch of bullies beating up the new kid. This is different.
I’ve been protected this way before. I know exactly how it ends.
“And Saint?” I ask.
Azriel goes still but not dramatically. He’s very good at composure, but the kind that is itself a tell. The pause before the careful answer.
“Stay away from him,” he says.
“Why?”
“He’s… He’s not safe.”
“Safe like the campus organizations who take an interest in scholarship students? Or a different kind of not safe?”
Azriel looks at me with something in his expression that I can only read as reluctant respect. “A different kind,” he says. “He’s not going to—” He stops, then starts again. “He won’t hurt you in the ways you might think. But he will change things. He changes everything he touches. And it’s not the kind you would want or need.”
“How do you know what I need?”
“I know more about your situation than you realize,” he says quietly.
The words land with weight. I furrow my brows. “What does that mean?”
He meets my eyes. And for a second, just a second, I see the thing behind his composure, not threat, not pity. Something that looks almost like guilt. “It means you should trust me. And it means that whatever Saint has done to get your attention, you should file it away and leave it there.”
“He sat behind me in class,” I say. “He’s a student. It’s not uncommon for someone in the same class to sit next to you.”
“He’s many things,” Azriel says. “Student is the most recent one.”
He pays for his coffee and leaves before I can ask what that means.
I sit with my half-eaten sandwich and the afternoon light coming through the west windows, and I think about a man in ahoodie who ducked through a doorframe and sat directly behind me and said accurate like it was a verdict.
I think about the footsteps in the hallway.
I think about my locked window.
I think about the nightmare that didn’t come.
And I think about the fact that I have walked, in my life, from one dangerous man directly to another, that I have a documented history of mistaking intensity for care, possession for protection, obsession for love, and that I am supposed to be smarter now, supposed to have the vocabulary for it, supposed to recognize the pattern before I’m already inside it.
I know the pattern.
