Chapter 20 — Terrifying Control
747 Words
Marlowe
The bucket of water balanced over the supply room door was, Reid would insist later, a perfectly ordinary prank that any prospect might pull on any other prospect, and he wasn't entirely wrong. It just happened to be the single worst possible prank anyone could have picked for me specifically, and I doubted very much that was an accident.
I caught it a half-second before it tipped — some instinct, some flicker of motion in my peripheral vision — and threw myself sideways instead of straight through the door, catching most of the water across one shoulder instead of my whole front.
Most. Not all.
Enough soaked through my shirt that I felt the fabric go cold and clinging against my skin, enough that I had exactly the length of one horrified breath to grab my jacket off the nearby hook and yank it closed before anyone walking past got a look at anything they shouldn't.
Nova, coming around the corner at exactly the wrong moment, blinked at me. "You good?"
"Fine." My voice came out too fast, too tight. "Prank gone wrong. Reid's, probably."
"Of course it's Reid's." She rolled her eyes, entirely unsuspicious, already moving on to something else. "I'll deal with him later. You sure you're okay? You look a little—"
"I'm fine," I said again, and meant it as a period on the sentence, and she let it drop, thank every god I'd stopped believing in and started believing in again purely out of necessity these last several weeks.
---
I found Reid in the mess hall twenty minutes later, dry now, jacket zipped to my throat despite the warmth of the room, and didn't bother with any preamble.
"That wasn't a prank."
"Sure it was." He didn't even look up from his food, infuriatingly casual. "Buckets over doors. Prospect classic. Ask literally anyone."
"You didn't pick me randomly, Reid."
That got his attention. He set his fork down, slow, and looked up at me with an expression that had finally, entirely dropped the pretense of innocence. "No," he agreed. "I didn't."
"Then say what you actually want to say."
"I want to say I'm patient." He leaned back, unhurried, entirely too pleased with himself for someone who'd just soaked me in front of half the mess hall on purpose. "I want to say I notice things other people don't bother noticing. And I want to say that eventually, Finch, patience always wins. You can flinch away from a bucket of water today. Won't matter. There's always tomorrow."
"You sound like a villain in a bad movie."
"Maybe." Something sharp flickered behind his easy tone. "Or maybe I'm just the only person in this den paying attention to something everyone else is too busy being charmed by to actually see."
I held his stare, refusing to give him the reaction he wanted, and said, low and steady, every ounce of fear I actually felt buried somewhere he'd never get to see it: "Keep watching, then. See what it gets you."
I walked away before he could answer, spine straight, heart going too fast, and didn't let myself shake until I was three hallways away and completely alone.
---
I didn't know King had heard any of it until training the next morning, when he pulled me aside from the general drills and put me through a set of exercises considerably more advanced than anything the rest of the prospects were running.
"Why am I not with the others?" I asked, catching my breath after the third round.
"Because you're better than the others." He said it flat, factual, no hedging in it at all. "No reason to waste your time on drills you've already outgrown."
"That's not subtle."
"Wasn't trying to be subtle." His eyes found mine, something steady and deliberate in them. "Heard what happened with the bucket. Heard what you said to him after. Figured the least I could do was make sure everyone in this den understands exactly why you're worth watching, on my terms, before Kastellan decides he gets to write that story on his."
I didn't have a response for that. I just stood there, breathing hard, watching a President who was supposed to keep some kind of professional distance choose, deliberately, publicly, to close it instead — and understood, with a small cold drop of dread underneath the warmth, exactly how much more dangerous this was going to get before it got any safer.
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