Page 17 of Bound to the Dorm Elf
Bill’s eyes snag on Rovax again, and tension tightens like a wire pulled too taut. He doesn’t move toward us, doesn’t speak—just studies him with the kind of detached interest you see in documentaries about big-game hunters watching a lion through binoculars. It’s not curiosity. It’s calculation.
Just as suddenly, he turns and walks out, his broad shoulders cutting through the doorway and disappearing down the hall like we were nothing but a footnote.
I let out a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “Okay,” I whisper, more to myself than to Rovax, “that was?—”
“A hunter,” Rovax says. The words rumble low, like the growl of an engine idling under his breath. “He carries the scent of one who stalks dangerous things.”
“Dangerous things like… you?” I ask, keeping my voice low enough not to carry, even though the corner we’ve claimed is empty now.
His gaze flicks toward me, steady and utterly unbothered. “If that is his quarry, he will find the hunt short and fatal.”
I close my laptop with a snap that’s louder than I mean it to be. “Cool. Great. Love the casual death threats in the library. But some of us live here, and I’d prefer not to end up on the evening news because you decided to go full Predator on a government agent.”
His head tilts, that faint frown tugging at his mouth. “Predator? Is that the word for a skilled killer in your tongue?”
“It’s the word for a movie monster that rips spines out of people,” I mutter. “Not… that you should be taking notes.”
“I take notes on everything,” he says, and there’s something in his voice—calm, assured—that makes me believe it.
I sling my bag over my shoulder and start toward the stairs. “Well, take this one down: that guy? He’s trouble. And if he’s looking for you?—”
“He is,” Rovax interrupts. No hesitation. No hedging.
I stop mid-step and turn back to him. “You don’t even know him.”
“I do not need to. I know the way he looked at me. That is enough.”
The way he says it sends a chill skittering down my spine—not because I think he’s wrong, but because I think he’s exactly right. I’ve seen that kind of stare before. Not often, but enough to recognize it: someone already imagining where the cracks in your armor are, someone who’s not afraid to put a crowbar in and pry.
“Well, I don’t like it,” I say, pushing through the door at the back of the library into the cooler hallway. “So we keep a low profile, yeah?”
Rovax follows me, his footsteps silent despite his size. “Low profile is a coward’s tactic.”
“It’s also the tactic that keeps people from disappearing into unmarked vans.”
He doesn’t answer, and that worries me more than if he’d argued.
By the time we reach the dorm, I’ve run the man’s face over in my head a dozen times. The stiff collar of his suit. The way his shoes didn’t quite match—expensive leather scuffed along the outside, like he spends more time pacing than sitting. The bland, forgettable features that are somehow less forgettable because of how deliberate they seem.
I dump my bag by my desk, but the tension doesn’t leave my shoulders. If anything, it settles in deeper.
“What do you know about people like him?” I ask finally, turning to where Rovax stands by the window, looking out at the quad like it’s enemy territory.
“They are the same everywhere,” he says without looking at me. “They hunt not for food, not for coin, but for the satisfaction of claiming what others cannot catch.”
“And you think he’s coming for you?”
Rovax’s reflection meets mine in the glass, his eyes narrowing slightly. “No. I know he is.”
That should terrify me. And maybe it does—somewhere under the stubborn part of my brain that keeps thinkingI can handle this.
But the truth is, I don’t think trouble’s coming. I think it’s already here.
CHAPTER 7
ROVAX
The grass here is too soft. It bends like spun silk under my boots, not the tough, sun-seared turf of home. I’m standing with Skylar at the edge of the dorm lawn, listening to her explain something about “student housing allocation” when a voice slices across the space like a badly-played war horn.
