Page 95 of Prey It By Ear

I pick up my stuff quickly, heading down the aisle to the front to leave. When I get to the door, I toss him a narrow-eyed glare over my shoulder and let the door snap shut hard behind me. For one stupid moment, I’m proud. Not because I won, but because I didn’t lose myself, or my voice, or my goddamn mind like others.

Time to work this anger out on the Games field at practice.

My Sharona

Fitz

I time the intercept perfectly—three minutes before the clock tower’s next melodramatic bong and just as Dolly exits the suspicious fuck’s classroom. She’s got her bag slung across her body and the look on her face says this period was frustrating. Naturally, I fall into step beside her before she can start internally compiling a hit list, though I’ll happily help her complete it when she’s ready.

There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for this woman, and I mean that in the strongest sense of the words.

Baby Girl doesn’t look up right away, but that’s okay. I can keep her company while we take the stupid elevator and get out of this building. Hell, I’ll even carry the conversation if it’s what she needs to shake off the bullshit. I’m good at that and she never complains when I go off on tangents.

“My morning has been pretty stellar,” I say as we do just that. “I had the lazy shits who didn’t finish their homework exiled to the library to do punishment papers, and those who did things got to experiment with more gray area coding as a reward. I also chased a bunch of silly freshman chits away from the annex area, and I’m pretty sure one of them pissed her uniform. Good stuff, all around.”

Blinking, my mate turns to look at me and then laughs softly. I love the way her face looks when she’s meeting my gaze, even when it’s not naked time. There’s so much emotion and care in it, and it doesn’t matter how crazy I’ve been. “Fitz, we’re going to get in trouble if you guys don’t let people use public spaces.”

“The fuck we will,” I reply with a smirk. “Trust me, no one we’ve bullied away from our safe spaces will complain because I know every single one of us has terrified them enough to think about packing their bags to go home.”

She clucks her tongue, but I know she’s pretending to scold me. Our bunny doesn’t want random people near our home anymore than I do. “Fitzy…”

I decide to change the subject now that she’s more relaxed, venturing into land mine territory. “How’d this morning go? Did the vulture try to get you to spill secrets or did she just spend the entire hour grooming her own self-loathing again?”

My Baby Girl glances at me with a little sideways flick of her eyes. “She didn’t even look at me, Fitz. The whole time, she was just typing like her life depended on finishing some big… whatever. Whatever she’s up to, it has to be big. Even Raina was surprised by it; that’s how odd it’s getting.”

“Suspicious, but not too concerning,” I say mildly, keeping the smug grin from taking over my face. “Maybe she’s discovered the joy of anonymous flame wars and she’s in a chatroom with other nasty bullies who hate their lives so much they have to make others miserable. Maybe she’s fighting for her shitty life as her relevancy and tiny amount of fame fades because people are waking up to how bad her shit is. It was bound to happen, you know.”

Dolly snorts, and I wink at her playfully. “If that’s the case, Farley will have less dumb shits to monitor and fight. He’ll be able to get down to business on the more important villains rather than the D-list wannabe. I’d prefer that, but my luck just doesn’t run that way.”

It’s cute she hasn’t figured out that this is not a normal occurrence, nor is it unassisted. I damn near have this entire campus wired so tightly that we could crush it if we wanted, but that’s unnecessary. My work in targeting the bitchy avian in ways that seem like normal problems but cascade into larger, more complex issues that occupy her brain like a squatter is succeeding. Between the witnesses and what I have going on, Rockland should stay distracted most, if not all, of the year. But I don’t want to make that common knowledge yet—it’s much too amusing to fuck the woman over with a giant middle finger without anyone weighing in on my ethics.

Instead, I open my mouth to tell her about my latest round of upgrades, but she beats me to it. “Fitzy, I’m really glad you’re the one to pick me up. That class was… off. It felt like it was planned to be such, but I can’t really figure out who it was supposed to freak out and who it was helping.”

I nod, tilting my head as we pass the library annex on our way to the arena. “You’re still muddling it out, right?”

“Yeah,” she replies with a sigh. “Maybe you should keep distracting me. I heard you fiddled with the gates and some of the electronic locks on campus. Snoozing with us wasn’t enough to ward off zoomies, I suppose?”

I feign offense. “You wound me, Baby Girl. I did that at three a.m. and still had time to rewrite the locker room’s access logs, so your pred-games bathroom breaks are invisible to the Council before anyone even noticed I was gone.”

“My hero,” she deadpans, but there’s affection under the snark. “If you ever decide to stop dating me, the Captain will probably propose. Your stuff makes the prey staff’s life a lot easier because it’s corralling the pred students more than ever. His crew is ecstatic and I can’t imagine the rest of them aren’t in the same boat.”

I sigh, shaking my head in pretend disappointment. “He already did, but he wanted me to sign a prenup that gave him full rights to all intellectual property developed during the marriage. I turned him down—we have creative differences that cannot be overcome, I fear.”

Dolly’s smiling now, and I can tell from the way her mouth tries to stay flat that she’s fighting a giggle. That’s what I hoped for, so I continue as we cross the quad together.

Shifting into full download mode, I look at her seriously. “I also recalibrated the west gate’s infrared nets. They can’t be spoofed by thermals anymore—at least not unless someone’s walking on their hands, and even then, I’m running a motion-sensor relay in the prey corridor so the Captain’s crew gets a two-second warning if anything big comes their way. That’s probably what they’re so happy about. But it didn’t take me long, and I did it because I don’t want assholes slipping in like at Cappie.”

She gives me a side-eye. “How did you test that—wait, do I want plausible deniability?”

“Banjo said he wanted to ‘feel the rush’ of sneaking past high-tech security. I have three hours of footage of him tripping the relay and then freezing like a trash panda in front of the staff lounge, just waiting to see if anyone would notice. I’m making a highlight reel because it’s gold.”

“This morning I added a secondary feed in the arena. The camera grid there used to have a dead zone between the women’s locker exit and the practice field, but not anymore. I spliced a backup cam into the mainline, and the only way to block it would be to physically break the housing. Even then, it’ll trip a silent alarm that pings everyone immediately.”

She stops dead, one foot on the gravel path, and looks at me like she’s not sure if she should be impressed or horrified. “How did you know that’s one of the places that was bothering me? I didn’t tell anyone.”

I grin, basking in my evil. “I just know things, my little bunny rabbit. You should definitely trust that I will find every hole and plug it, even when it’s not in the bedroom.”

She gives me a look—fond, exasperated, a little bit turned on—and then resumes walking. “You are genuinely terrifying sometimes, Fitzy.”