Page 120 of Prey

“The women I sell aren’t women like you.” The words come out flat, because flat is the only way I can get them out at all. “Not one of them ever was. You think they were innocent,” he says. “Women like you. Pulled out of quiet lives and handed to men who wanted to own something.” A pause. “Not one of them was.”

“Then who were they?”

“The ones who built us.” He says it without weight, which is worse than if he’d loaded it. “Project Architect didn’t run itself. There were women who signed for the children. Ran the conditioning rooms. Kept the files, mixed the compounds, made the schedules, then went home at night and slept fine.” His jaw works. “I find them. I’ve been finding them for fifteen years.”

“And the auctions?”

“Real.” He doesn’t look away, which is how I know he’s giving me all of it now. “The buyers in Dubai. Munich. Every one of them real. I sell them, Jenna. I find the women who turned children into property, and I make them into property. I hand them to the kind of men they spent their careers serving, and I let those men do to them what they let be done to us.” His eyes are steady and terrible. “Seventeen years I’ve told myself there’s no cleaner justice than that. They built a market in human beings. I merely made them an active, though unwilling, participant on the opposite side of the bars”

I should feel relief. They earned a reckoning. Maybe they earned exactly this one. That’s not the feeling that comes.

What comes is the cell. The cold concrete. Ninety nights of belonging to someone else with no end I could see. I know precisely what he sold those women into, because I learned the shape of it from the inside, in the dark, in my own body. AndI can’t make myself glad that anyone is living it right now. Not even them. That’s the thing I can’t get around.

“And me,” I say. “I wasn’t one of them.”

Something crosses his face I’ve never seen there. Not guilt—closer to repentance, and a little like grief. “No. You’re the only one who never was. In seventeen years, I’ve taken exactly one person who didn’t earn it. I watched you for eleven days knowing you weren’t on any list, knowing you’d done nothing but survive—and I took you anyway, because I couldn’t watch you and not.” His voice doesn’t change, which is how I understand what it costs him. “Every other acquisition had a file before I ever saw their face. A name that earned the cage. You had nothing. No file, no sentence, no justice owed. Just a woman who checked her locks like she already knew the world was hunting her.” His jaw works. “I told myself I was studying a target. I wasn’t. I was already keeping you. That’s the only time the work was ever a lie—and it was a lie I told myself, not a buyer.”

I sit with all of it. He’s spent seventeen years taking the people involved in the same project that built him and feeding them into a similar situation—one at a time, and calling it the only clean justice there is. I won’t stand here and tell him the people who did that to a child deserve gentleness.

But he didn’t do that to me. He took me because he couldn’t help it.

“I’m not comfortable with it.” It comes out quietly, but my voice doesn’t shake. “I want to be. It would be easier to look at what they did and decide they had it coming and leave it there. Part of me does. But you’re not killing them, Nik. You’re handing them to men who’ll keep them alive for years, owned—and you know exactly what that is, because it was done to you. And I know exactly what it is, because it was done to me.” My hand presses flat to my stomach. “I can’t be glad about it. I can’t raise a child in a house that runs on it.”

He doesn’t argue.

“Okay,” he says.

“Okay?”

“Okay.” Quieter. “It stopped feeling like justice a while ago. I just never had a reason to set it down that I trusted more than the reasons to keep going.” His thumb moves over my knuckles. “Now I do.”

“Now you do,” I echo, and put my hand over the one he has spread across our child, so he knows I understand exactly what he means by it.

Nikolai nods and moves close enough that I feel the heat of him, far enough that I get to choose whether to close that last bit of distance between our bodies.

I lean into his side, letting him take some of my weight, and he doesn’t say anything, because there’s nothing left that needs saying tonight.

Somewhere out there, in rooms I haven’t seen yet, children are learning what he learned. I can’t carry that for them. But he knows where every one of those rooms is, and tomorrow we start pulling them out—one child at a time, until there are none of them left.

43

JENNA

The nausea hits me like a freight train as I sit at the massive dining table on Infinity’s sixth floor, surrounded by eight of the most dangerous men I’ve ever known arguing about who burned the garlic bread.

“I told you to set a timer,” Darius snaps at Damon, who’s examining the blackened edges.

“I don’t need a timer. I can smell when things are ready.”

“Current evidence to the contrary.”

One month pregnant, and everything smells like death or makes me want to vomit. I press my palm against my still-flat stomach and try to breathe through another wave of queasiness.

“You look green,” Marcus observes from across the table. “Morning sickness?”

“All-day sickness,” I correct, accepting the glass of water Raphael slides toward me without being asked. “Though it’s better than last week.”

“The first trimester’s rough,” Theon says absently, not looking up from whatever he’s sketching on his napkin. “Your hormones are recalibrating everything. Should level out around week twelve.”