Page 94 of Beautiful Prey

I head upstairs while he talks. The lock on Jade’s door takes seconds, and I technically own the building now anyway. The master codes came with everything else Vasco lost.

“Whatever you’re doing out there ends now,” Dad continues. “You get on a transport, you come home, you marry Aleron Veyra, and you restore this House to the position your absence has jeopardized.”

The lock releases beneath my hand.

I shouldn’t be here. I open the door anyway.

Jade’s entire life fits inside one room.

It’s clean. Almost aggressively so, with every surface scrubbed despite the dust that must crawl back in the second a window opens. Two narrow beds sit against opposite walls, with a kitchen between them that amounts to a counter and a single ring. One pot. Two plates. Two cups. Everything comes in twos. Everything is measured because nothing can afford to be wasted.

A washing line stretches across one corner. Jade’s shirt hangs from it, threadbare at the collar, one cuff repaired with stitches so neat I know he sewed them himself.

“You’ve gone quiet.” Dad mistakes it for sulking. “Is this about the Veyra boy? I met Aleron properly before they left. Your intended is a handsome thing, Asher. I’ll grant you that much. Soft-spoken, docile, trained to be agreeable in all the ways that matter.”

He pauses before adding, “A man with my blood could have a great deal of fun with a creature so biddable. I don’t understand what you imagine you’re missing out there. Come home and unwrap your present. I’m sure that if I tell the Imperial you’re finally on your way, they’ll return quickly enough.”

Something turns over in me, cold and sick. My skin crawls, old bruises itching where there are no bruises anymore, as my body remembers the man who can describe a person like something to be unwrapped.

“Everyone is a person,” I say before I can stop myself, moving deeper into the flat. A strip of tablets sits on the counter, half gone, the days written beside them in a careful hand.

Onyx’s. Every dose counted.

“You never seem to know the difference between a person and something you own.”

“What exactly are you accusing me of, Asher?”

“You know exactly what I’m accusing you of.”

“And if you think I don’t already know precisely what’s kept you out there, you’re mistaken. I know about Jade Mercer. If you imagine I won’t have it dealt with the moment you land, you’ve learned nothing.” His voice drops into that old register, the one that used to come just before the worst of it. “You have never once wanted anything I couldn’t take away from you, Asher. Do not make me teach you that lesson twice⁠—”

I end the call. I’ve never hung up on him before. My hand shakes as I lower the slate. Fear comes first, old and automatic, but the anger is there too, hot enough to meet it this time and finally aimed where it belongs.

For years, he taught me that wanting something only gave him another way to hurt me. Standing here in Jade’s flat, I hate how quickly my body still believes him.

I make myself look around again.

There’s almost nothing here that’s only Jade’s. Everything serves a purpose.

Except one thing.

On the shelf beside his bed sits a cheap resin cast of the green Calder diorama, the kind sold at the museum desk to schoolchildren for a few credits. The paint is uneven, and one corner has chipped.

He bought this at the museum.

I pick it up, feeling how little it weighs in my hand, and slip it into my pocket anyway.

At least there’s something of his I can carry. Dad got one thing right. I know how to take what I want, and I fucking take what I want.

The difference is that I’ve spent my whole life taking things because they were there. Money. Bodies. Power. Whatever filled an hour or made someone else flinch first. Jade is the first thing I’ve wanted enough to ruin something for.

Dad has spent my whole life arranging my inheritance, the treaty, and House Veyra into a straight line, and I am going to walk off it.

Jade looked at me in a forest where everyone else ran, but he chose to stop. He dragged me out of the dirt when leaving me there would have made his own life easier. He fights me when everyone else bends. He looks at everything I am and still makes me work for every inch I earn.

I don’t want easier. I want him.

And if keeping him means tearing apart every plan Dad ever made for me, then for once in my life I know exactly what I’m willing to destroy.