Page 2 of Rage
The man is massive, not performatively, but structurally, the way people are when their bodies were built for a purpose.
His gaze moves over my worn boots, cheap bag, the tension locked in my shoulders. Something flickers in his eyes. Recognition. And then something colder.
“First day,” he says.
It’s obvious. I nod anyway.
His mouth curves slightly. “You’ll learn.”
“Learn what?”
He tilts his head as if I’ve said something interesting. “How things work here.”
A chill moves up my spine.
Before I can respond, he steps past me as if I was never worth stopping for.
But as he passes, he leans just close enough that I feel his breath graze my ear. “Try not to run.” A pause. “The best part of being Prey is the chase.”
And then he keeps walking.
He doesn’t look back.
I stand at the fountain and stare after him.
Prey.
He’s messing with me. It’s obvious I’m not from here.
I tell myself that and almost believe it. Except the word lodges somewhere under my sternum and stays there, and underneath it, a darker thought surfaces.
What if this place won’t keep me safe?
The first few days pass in a blur of polished syllabi and careful silences.
Some students wear labels I recognize from magazines in waiting rooms. Others wear things I’ve seen on discount racks.
The mix is both wider and stranger than I expected, voices from the East Coast, the South, the West, some flavored with old money’s brand of etiquette.
Apart from the man at the fountain and the low-grade awareness of being watched, this is the part I dreamed of. Different people. Different languages. The ordinary symphony of a campus at the start of term.
Professors explain the readings and the deadlines are unforgiving, but I lean into all of it gratefully. Into the structure, the task, and the clean architecture of expectation. Work has always been the one thing I could do without apology. It asks nothing of me but focus.
But underneath the routines, the hum persists. Every unfamiliar face, every casual glance, carries weight I can’t put down. Not because I’m a stranger. It’s normal. Every campus has strangers at the start of the term.
It’s the label. The invisible asterisk next to my name: no money, no family, no one who would make noise if something went wrong.
The few things I do have came through him.
Roman Mancini.
The man I ran from. The man with the power to make things and people disappear.
As the sun drops below the tree line and the campus settles into shadow, the stone buildings taking on the quality of a Gothic film set, I retreat to my dorm room and try to read. The room is sparse and impersonal. I haven’t let myself make it mine. Making it mine would mean believing I get to stay, but one thing I find odd is that I don’t have a roommate.
On the third morning, I find my dorm room unlocked. I stand in the hallway with my key still pinched between myfingers, staring at the knob as if it might explain itself. I know I locked it. I remember the click. I remember checking it once, then turning back from the stairs to check it again because old habits don’t care that I’m hundreds of miles from home.
Inside, nothing looks untouched.
