Page 31 of Rage
I know it in my body the same way my body knows about exits and the direction of threats.
I know what it feels like when someone’s attention on you is a symptom of their pathology rather than a genuine feeling.
But then, and this is the part I sit with for a long time in the thinning afternoon light, I think about what accurate felt like.
Roman never once made me feel seen. He made me feel claimed. There’s a difference. He looked at me and saw territory. He saw a thing to organize his control around.
I close my eyes.
The memory of that voice, close and low, one word:
Accurate.
I open my eyes. I pick up my bag. I go back to my dorm room, and I sit on the floor.
I open my laptop, and I start building the chart I always build when I can’t make sense of something. A clean grid—information I know in one column, information I don’t know in another, and the space between them the map I’m trying to read.
One column: Azriel Vikiar. Family money. Tells partial truths. Wants to protect me from something he won’t name. Feels like genuine concern, not possession. Good looking.
Other column: Saint. No last name offered. New to campus but not new to the campus, the alternative program reference, the way he moved through the lecture hall like someone returning to a known space. Sits behind me. Maybe sends texts from unknown numbers. Maybe writes me notes and stands by my door in the dark. Intimidating. Mysterious. Gorgeous. Makes my heart speed up.
In the space between them: whatever is happening at this school. Whatever the campus organizations are doing with scholarship students.
I stare at the chart for a long time.
Then I add a third column.
What I feel. Afraid. Hyperalert. Exhausted. Interested.
Which is the most dangerous item on the list, and the one I can’t cross out.
Thursday comes fast.
My last class ends at five forty-five. I have nowhere I need to be until dinner service opens at seven. It’s the gap in my schedule that I usually spend in the library, but the library closes at five thirty now. There’s a note on the door about reduced hours during the fall.
I consider going back to my room. The route from the academic building to my dormitory cuts through the main quad, which at six in the evening is mostly empty.
The students who eat early are already in the dining hall, while those who eat late are somewhere else—maybe the bar Babylon across the street or still in their rooms.
I’ve walked it every day since I arrived.
I walk it now.
My bag on my shoulder, my hands in my pockets, the cold air sharp with the smell of rain. The floodlights on the quad have come on in the early dark, throwing long shadows between them.
I’m halfway across when I hear it.
Not footsteps but something subtler. A shift of air that happens when someone steps out of a shadow that was too still for too long.
“Amy.”
The voice is behind me, and I don’t recognize it. That’s the first thing I register. Not Azriel. Not Saint. Someone else, and the way he says my name, like he’s confirming a detail on a list, makes every instinct I have come online at once.
I turn.
He’s attractive. Icy-blue eyes that can freeze any girl into place. Tall. Lean. Built the way the sons of wealthy, powerful men are sometimes built with the confidence of someone who’s never had to earn room. Good coat. Expensive shoes but the wrong choice of footwear for this campus in autumn.
And I don’t like his smile.
