Page 32 of Rage
“I don’t know you,” I say.
“You will now,” he says easily. “My name is Victor. I’m part of the program that sponsors your scholarship.” He takes a step forward. “I wanted to introduce myself personally. The program likes to check in with its recipients.”
Every alarm in my body is screaming.
I take a step back. “I’m late.”
“I won’t keep you long.” His smile doesn’t change, and its unchanging nature is the worst thing. “I just wanted to make sure you know that the program is very invested in you. Very invested. And that investment comes with expectations.”
I take another step back. My heel catches on an uneven stone, but I right myself.
“I think I should?—”
“Don’t.”
The voice comes from behind Victor.
Victor goes still.
I look past him.
Saint stands at the edge of the light, twenty feet away, hands in his pockets. Tall. Black hoodie over his impressively large frame. He’s not moving. He doesn’t look angry, which is somehow worse than if he did.
He looks the way a person looks when they’ve already decided how something ends and are just waiting for it to get there.
“Walk away,” he says to Victor. Very quietly.
Victor turns. And I watch, with clinical fascination, the moment when Victor Sokolov registers that Saint is a threat.
He goes pale.
Not dramatically. Not all at once. But the color leaves his face in the way it leaves the faces of people who know exactly what they’re looking at.
“And you’re supposed to be—” Victor starts.
“Indoors?” Saint says. “Yes. I get restless.”
Victor looks at him, confused, for another two seconds. Then he looks at me. And whatever he sees in that look, whatever calculation he’s running about the cost and benefit of whatever Saint means to him, resolves quickly.
He straightens his coat. “I’ll see you around, Amy. Maybe get some coffee before class?” He doesn’t wait for a response before he walks away.
He doesn’t run because men like Victor don’t run, but his pace is not casual.
I stand in the middle of the quad with my heart hammering. Saint walks toward me until he’s close enough that I have to tilt my head back to look at him, and the floodlight is behind him, so his face is in shadow. I ask, “Were you following me?”
“Yes,” he says.
“How long have you been following me?”
“As long as it’s needed.”
I stare at him. “That’s not?—”
“Safe,” he says. “I know. None of this is safe. But that”—he tilts his head in the direction Victor walked—“that was less safe. And I was in the area.”
“For how long?” I ask. “Have you been in the area?”
Something moves in his face. Not quite an expression, something before the decision to arrange your features into one thing or another. “A while,” he says.
