Chapter 8
JAGGER
We’d been running for over an hour when we stumbled on the new team ambling through the shadows, their jeans wet from the sprinklers. They were tall and broad, with the sort of muscle you got from doing real work, outdoor work that made your hands calloused and your face brown from the sun.
Their masks were a match to their bodies: bulls, the kind with horns that looked slow but gored you to death once they got a hold of you.
And they weren’t bare-chested like the rest of us, not entirely: the tattoos inked onto their torsos crawled out from under brown leather vests that looked like they belonged in the Wild West, not the tunnels under a blue-collar town like Blackwell Falls.
Which made sense when you thought about where they lived.
“Yo.” Vigo uncapped a bottle of water and guzzled the whole thing in one long gulp. “Stopping to smell the roses?”
“Not in any hurry,” the blond bull said.
His friend glared through his own mask. “Wish you’d told us about the fucking water.”
“Surprise,” Vigo said.
I’d debated the merit of the sprinklers as soon as they’d turned off and I’d realized I was going to have to hunt in wet denim, but it was too late now. Besides, it was only fair that we should be as uncomfortable as the girls.
The dark-haired bull scowled. “My balls are already chafing.”
“Sucks to be your balls,” Vigo said.
“Seen any of the girls yet?” I asked.
I didn’t want to admit it, but I was looking for news about Cassie Montgomery. Hawk was right about playing by the rules and not pulling rank — despite the fact that the Butchers had never hesitated to do it — but I was still worried one of the other teams might get to the little redhead first.
The one with chafed balls adjusted his dick inside his jeans. “One of the blondes.”
“Not your girl?” Vigo asked.
“Looking for the other one,” the blond said.
I tried not to show my relief. Now that I’d laid eyes on Cassie Montgomery, I was determined to have her. I didn’t doubt our prowess in the tunnels, but there was an element of chance to the Hunt.
You had to be in the right place at the right time.
It was part of why we tore through the tunnels like animals. Sure, it was fucking fun to run and skip and howl, to give into all our impulses, impulses that probably would’ve gotten us locked up if we did them aboveground in the light of day.
But also, we covered more ground by running, and since we always had a goal in mind — even if that goal was just playtime with one of the Hunt girls — we needed to cover as much ground as possible before the other teams.
“Better move before someone else marks her,” Hawk said as we continued past them.
“Thanks for the advice,” one of them drawled as we started running again.
“Was that fucker being a smart-ass?” Vigo asked. “I think that fucker was being a smart-ass.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let them hunt their way.”
“At least they’re not looking for Cassie.”
Hawk let out one of his war cries and we flew past several of the purple bulbs hanging from the ceiling, intermittent piles of junk, and one stack of bottled water.
It was a far cry from the sleek offices in the city where I used to make my living, trading invisible shares in companies that made other people — and myself — rich.
That had been fun at first. Exciting, even.
Amassing wealth was an addicting game. How much would you risk? How far would you go?
It was gambling really, betting that this company or that would make money or lose it. That a merger would make money or lose it. That a fresh influx of capital would help a company grow or enable it to make foolish business decisions that would ultimately tank its value.
I’d enjoyed it for a while, had gotten off on the thrill. It wasn’t just the payoff: the high-rise apartment with walls of windows, the new car every year (paid for with cash), the beautiful, pampered women and five-star vacations.
It had been the fucking thrill. The risk.
Except after a while, it hadn’t seemed so thrilling. That was what people didn’t understand about money: it was inherently boring. There were only so many things you could buy with it. Only so many things you could do with it.
And when you reached that point, it might as well be Monopoly money. It was that meaningless.
Which was why I’d ended up with Hawk. He’d been a suit too — albeit a different kind of suit — but he’d read the writing on the wall of his own psyche, had gotten out before he’d been kicked out, unlike Vigo who’d left a trail of damage in his wake at the university where he’d been a professor before they’d finally forced him out.
Hawk had shown me there were other ways to take risks, risks that involved more than money.
Like the Hunt.
The tunnels were risky for the girls, and if they lost, what came after was risky too.
But for us the risks lay in what happened if the girls won. Then we would have to kill for them, and no one had been more surprised than me to find that when the victim really deserved it, killing made my dick even harder than making money.
And that was the thing about Hunt girls: their intended victims always deserved it.
The fucking incels of the world wanted everyone to believe that women were weak, that they were emotional, that they weren’t capable of making good decisions. But in all the years we’d been playing in the Hunt, I’d never met a single girl whose victim didn’t deserve what they got.
If you wanted to hear about the worst of humanity, all you needed to do was talk to a woman. They bore the brunt of society’s weakest, most cowardly men.
Who could blame them for wanting a little revenge?
I thought about Cassie Montgomery, making her way through the tunnels, trying to win.
Who did she want dead? And why hadn’t she gone to Bram to get it done?