Whatever happened in this alley, I am on the living side of it.
The security light flickers.
I look up.
Left. Right.
There is no one else here.
But the air feels displaced. The space that was recently occupied by something large and deliberate and is now very carefully empty. The way a room feels after someone has just left. The way the dark feels when it has recently held something I did not see.
I get to my feet.
My legs are unsteady, but they hold. I smooth my shirt with shaking hands. I can tell Marcus is alive, but he’s clearly knocked out by the way his chest is moving with shallow breaths.
I head to the end of the alley, out onto the lamplit path, and I keep walking, all the way back to the dormitory without stopping.
I sit on my bed until four in the morning, turning over the blank space in my memory the way you probe a wound to understand its depth.
Someone must have put something in my drink.
I close my eyes and search through the fog of my memories and remember Rose telling me her ride was there. I remember her assuring me it was okay and that mine was on the way.
Then Marcus had his hand on my lower back.
And then someone else had their hands on Marcus.
I don’t know who.
But somewhere underneath the fear and the fog, underneath the part of me that is still shaking and will be for days, is a quieter feeling. Something that sits in my chest like a coal, small and very warm.
I’m not afraid of the dark the way I was an hour ago.
Before I realize how long I’ve been sitting on my bed, the building starts to wake up around me. I wait until I take a shower. Then I go to breakfast.
I don’t say a word about the alley to anyone. I don’t call Rose. I don’t call security.
Because whatever could have happened didn’t, and I have a very good feeling about why.
Saint
His name is Marcus Fell.
Third year. Business faculty. He’s been Victor Sokolov’s campus liaison for the past eight months—the one who identified candidates from the scholarship intake, ran background checks, and flagged the ones with no family connections. The one who slipped things into drinks at parties and walked Prey out the side door with a hand at their back and a story ready for anyone who asked.
He’d done it before. The Order’s files confirmed four previous incidents, all quietly managed and resolved in the way that powerful institutions resolved things that would look bad in daylight.
He had his hand on her back.
I watched him do it from the far end of the room, through a crowd of people who were all looking at each other and none of them looking at me, which was perfect.
I tracked him from the kitchen to the side door, and I waited long enough to confirm where he was taking her before I followed.
The alley took forty seconds.
Marcus Fell will not be putting his hands on anyone for a long time. That is the part of this I am comfortable committing to.
I reluctantly left her there, conscious and breathing, since the worst of the drug had already metabolized out of her system. I checked.