Page 136 of Rage
He hangs up.
I sit with the afternoon.
I think about her this morning. How she sat up in the gray light. The way she said “yours.” With the same precise, controlled fury she brings to everything she has decided matters.
Azriel will speak, and Valen is going to run his calculations, and Zero is going to produce his surveillance files, and it may even work. There is a version of this afternoon when the Order looks at the full picture of what Victor Sokolov has been doing on this campus for six months and decides that the asset who stopped him is more valuable than the liability he represents.
I also know there is another version. I have been in enough rooms to understand that institutions protect themselves first and everything else second. The Order did not build three generations of power by being moved by the right argument.They built it by understanding leverage, and the leverage they have on me has always been the same.
The silence of four walls that know you and do not care.
I look at my hands.
I think about her body and the way it takes me so perfectly.
I think about eleven minutes of sleep in the dark and waking to find her watching me with an expression I had never seen directed at me before. The way she takes me in her mouth while she plays with her pretty pussy.
I think about what it means to choose something and have it choose you back.
Whatever happens at four o’clock doesn’t matter because I have her and the gift of control as I head to the High Chamber.
Amy
Azriel tells me at two o’clock.
He comes to find me in the library, at my corner table, in the periodicals section, the pocket of privacy I have made mine. He sits across from me, looking at me with the expression of someone about to deliver information they have been dreading.
“The hearing is at four,” he says. “I’m going to speak for him. Valen is going to speak. Zero has the full file on Victor’s operation. There is a real chance, Amy. I need you to understand that there is a real chance.”
“What kind of chance?” I ask.
He meets my eyes. “Forty percent. Maybe fifty if Valen’s read on Silas is right.”
“And the other fifty?”
“He goes back,” Azriel says quietly. “Indefinitely.”
I look at my notebook. “I want to speak,” I say.
He shakes his head immediately. “You are not a member of the Order. You have no standing in the Chamber. If you appear, it gives Silas a reason to frame this as a protection failure rather than an operational success, and that is worse for Saint, not better.”
“Then tell me what I can do.”
Azriel looks at me for a long moment. He looks like a man who has been carrying a version of love for someone for months, has watched it change into something else, has made his peace with the change, but has not yet made peace with everything the change has cost him. I know he likes me, but I think I have fallen for his brother, and I could never see Azriel as anything more than a friend. And deep down, I think he likes someone else. I can tell by how he looks at me.
“Write it down,” he says finally. “Everything. What happened from the day you arrived. What he did, what it cost him, and what he knew and chose anyway. Write it down and give it to me, and I will put it in front of Silas myself.”
“Will that matter?”
He looks at me with those careful, honest eyes. “I don’t know. But it is true. And truth is the only thing I have found that the Order cannot entirely manage. It’s safer this way for all of us.”
I open my notebook to a fresh page. I write for two hours.
I write about the courtyard and the note under the door and the back row of the lecture hall. I write about the quad in the dark and Marcus and the alley and the library and the roof. I write about what it means to be chosen by someone who had every reason to keep the door closed and opened it anyway. I write about the sex and the way he stuffed my panties in my mouth an hour ago while he fucked me on the kitchen counter and the marks on my knees he put ice on when he was done from banging against the cabinets.
I write that he is not the monster they built the room for. He is what the room made instead. And the difference matters.
I fold the pages. I give them to Azriel at three thirty, the part the Order needs.
