Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Staggering to a halt, she bent and clutched her knees. When she looked up, she stilled.
“What the…” Daisy turned in a circle, confused by the familiar crossing, certain she’d been there before.
“No.” She shook her head in disbelief. “Impossible.”
Her brow pinched with the sudden urge to cry. How was she back here? She’d been going east. Or so she thought.
Daisy stumbled forward in disbelief and cursed when the bell tolled again. Too close.
Shoving through a row of privets, she rushed from shadow to shadow until—
“Damn it!” She was back at the veranda where they started.
The bells tolled three more times. They were ringing more frequently now. That meant the hunters were getting more aggressive as the tributes got weaker.
Aunt Vanessa had mentioned a safe zone at the house, but there were too many hunters lingering about, shadows moving casually across the veranda as they congratulated each other over their recent conquest. The house was too dangerous. She had to keep moving.
But where? What direction? Did it even matter? This place was a maze of madness meant to exhaust her.
Pushing off the wall, she stared at the distant ballroom. Its windows blazed against the black sky like the eyes of some great beast watching over its domain.
Masculine voices carried, rambunctious and cheerful. So casual. So indifferent to what the tributes were actually sacrificing. If she had a rock, she’d throw it at them.
Daisy recalculated her steps as she drifted along the shadows of a hedgerow. If the main lodge was here and—
Her breath caught, and she stilled, sensing danger before her eyes could make sense of the warning. She looked back at the lodge, its Gothic towers stabbing into the clouds as the world fell to pieces below.
There.
A chill raced up her spine as a figure appeared on a balcony, separate from the revelry below. The glow of the torchlights didn’t reach that high, and the windows were dark. But the moonlight revealed the broad silhouette of a man.
He stood utterly still, a statue carved from flesh and silk, a face obscured by distance and darkness, watching—not the grounds, or the hunters below. But her.
His gaze enclosed around her like a physical weight, like a hand reaching out.
Spotted.
She couldn’t look away. He held her under some paralyzing command.
When he inclined his head ever so slightly, she knew exactly who he was.
R.A.
She recognized his stance, his silent acknowledgement. That same subtle nod from the ball. A gesture between strangers who weren’t quite strangers anymore.
There was something different and reserved, something that kept him apart from the rest.
What was he doing up there, alone, while everyone else hunted below?
Being spotted out in the open should have terrified her. Another predator marking his target. A lamb in a garden of wolves. Alone. Yet…
Her breath caught as he stepped back from the railing, disappearing into the darkness, as if he were the one who needed to hide.
“That was my move,” she muttered, dropping her gaze, then looking back one last time.
Gone, as if he never existed at all.
A branch snapped behind her, and she whirled, hands up, heart pounding, but the path was empty. The fog curled and shifted, hiding whatever had made the sound.
Chapter Seventeen
Hide
Jack stepped back from the balcony railing and let the darkness swallow him.
She saw him.
Not the way women usually see him—the glint of wealth, the intentional design of carefully constructed power. No, she saw him in ways that made him painfully aware of every secret he hid beneath his tailored clothes.
She looked through the darkness, through the façade. Even from a distance, even with fog rising between them, she somehow managed to look right into his eyes.
Twice now.
And she didn’t flinch—a rarity very few people had the balls to do.
His thumb spun his ring, an old, unconscious habit he’d never managed to break. The signet was warm from his skin, the engraved initials worn smooth from years of this exact gesture.
He turned from the window and moved deeper into the suite, where shadows pooled in the corners and the clamor of the hunt faded to a dreamlike drone.
Lowering into a chair, Jack lifted his phone, the screen casting pale light across his features as the security feeds blinked to life. Sixteen camera angles capturing the grounds in a silver-tinged, grid view. The maze. The gardens. The grotto. The forest’s edge where fog made ghosts of the trees.
And those were only the angles he was babysitting. The team of men in the security room were on full alert, tracking every player of the game, regardless if they were hunter, stag, or doe.
The bell tolled from above. Another conquest.
On camera seven, a hunter had a tribute pressed against a marble column, her legs wrapped around his waist, her head thrown back in what appeared to be passion.
On camera twelve, three figures moved through an arbor—two hunters circling a tribute who’d stopped running, her chest heaving, her hands raised in what might have been surrender or invitation.