Chapter 4 Seeds of Doubt #2
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t give herself to a stranger—let alone several. She’d never even given herself to a friend.
How many were there? Who organized such a thing? The depravity of it all was dizzying.
Her tooth throbbed as she massaged her jaw, but found no relief.
A million pounds…
Her stare snagged on the box holding her mother’s ashes.
The thought of doing what they described was unthinkable.
Her imagination simply couldn’t fathom such an experience.
But could she do twenty more years of this?
Could she accept a lifetime of feeding sheets through machines?
That she could picture, with all of its mundane, unrewarding misery.
She chewed her lower lip. The safeword anchored her thoughts. Her mind kept coming back to the safeword, the way her tongue returned to her aching tooth.
Reluctantly, she reached for her phone and continued reading.
SECTION V: GROUNDS & BOUNDARIES
The Hunt will take place on a private estate comprising approximately 200 acres. Designated safe zones will be marked with green lanterns. The Hunt begins at sunset and ends at sunrise. Tributes still uncaptured at sunrise will receive their full participation payment of ￡1,000,000.
Sunset to sunrise. Twelve hours. Two hundred acres. That was a lot of ground. If she found good hiding spots, stayed mobile, and avoided the obvious paths, she might survive the night without being caught.
They said the million pounds was for participating. A capture resulted in more. If she participated…
A million pounds…
Her brain couldn’t envision such a sum.
She continued to read. Her eyes roamed over pages and pages of terms in what seemed like an unending and very well-thought-out agreement.
The sheer detail made her believe this sort of twisted event had happened before.
She considered the other women who might have had the courage to go through with such a crazy request. She wasn’t sure if she could be that kind of woman.
A million pounds…
With less than twenty minutes left, she read the final section.
SECTION VI: CONFIRMATION OF UNDERSTANDING
By signing below, you affirm that you have read and understood all terms, consent freely to participate in The Hunt as a Tribute, and accept responsibility for your own experience while acknowledging the safeguards in place.
Upon submission, a good-faith deposit will be transferred to your designated account immediately.
With only a few minutes left to decide, she tried to make up her mind. Her brain was on overload. Her choice could be a life-altering decision—or not.
She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Questions flooded her mind, filling her head in a deafening roar as she searched desperately for answers that didn’t exist. How was she supposed to make up her mind in such a state?
Surviving a lifetime of wondering what could have happened would be worse than surviving a single night. But she couldn’t find the nerve to say yes.
“Fuck.” She massaged her temples and scrubbed her palms over her face. “Fuck!”
She searched the final statement for a sign, something—anything—that might help her make up her mind.
A good faith deposit…
She hadn’t given any banking information, and they hadn’t said how much. But these people—whoever they were—didn’t play with small numbers.
One million pounds... Possibly two.
What would “good faith” look like to them? Fifty pounds? A hundred? Enough to fix her tooth?
Among all the logical thoughts racing through her head was one reckless voice that wouldn’t shut up.
Just do it.
You have nothing to lose.
Whatever they do to you, you can handle it.
You can handle anything.
It’s only one night.
Twelve hours.
The life she’d been living, if one could call it living, already stretched several dreary lifetimes long. This was a chance to be something more.
Daisy couldn’t fathom a million pounds, so she tried to imagine what she would do with less.
Fifteen-thousand pounds could get her a car.
Imagine a life where she didn’t have to walk everywhere.
Two hundred thousand could get her a house.
No more rent. And for what? A few hours running around in the dark?
This could be her way out. How often did someone get an offer like this? Never. The fact that she’d been given this chance at all seemed a miracle of some sort.
Three minutes left. If she didn’t choose soon, the decision would be made for her. She couldn’t decide if she wanted to do this or not, but she knew having the opportunity ripped away would be an unbearable outcome that would likely haunt her for the rest of her pitiful life.
00:02:26
00:02:25
00:02:24
Her clammy hands gripped the phone as she stared at the cracked screen. Without thinking beyond the fact that she didn’t want this feeling of possibility to end, she signed her name.
“Oh, God...” She pressed SUBMIT.
The screen went black, and her heart stopped on a gasp.
She refreshed, and the browser crashed, booting her back to her home screen as if the last two hours had never happened. Daisy frantically tried to reload the site, typing the address with trembling fingers, but the familiar error message stared back at her: Page not found.
“Shit!” She hurled the phone onto her mattress, rubbing her head and rocking through the twisted nausea knotting in her belly. “What did I just do?”
Tears of frustration pricked her eyes. They knew where she lived.
She just agreed to do God knows what with who the hell knows.
These people were powerful. That much was clear.
And she just signed herself over to them under some foolish belief that this could somehow lift her out of her little grey life.
“Idiot.” She was a fool. A desperate, pathetic fool who deserved exactly what she got, which was either nothing—probably just some hack job into her empty life that would disappoint anyone hoping to find something of value—or exactly what the site said. A hunt.
She shook her head. Things like that didn’t actually exist. This was England. Where would something like that even take place?
She accepted then that this was nothing more than a big, fat waste of time that would amount to nothing. Always nothing.
Tomorrow, she’d go back to the laundry. Feed sheets through the press. Count the hours until she could collapse into bed and pretend her life belonged to someone else.
Ping.
The soft, almost apologetic chime broke the silence. Daisy frowned as her phone cast a faint glow through the blankets.
Lifting the device, she read the text on the screen, unsure how this was happening. She hadn’t given anyone her number, and the sender field was blank. Completely blank.
Her finger trembled as she opened it.
A good-faith deposit has been made to your account.
“Oh, my God.” She looked up, unsure what to do. “Where? What account?”
She went where money inevitably went, knowing full well she had not provided any of her banking information while filling out that form. The ancient interface of her banking app took an eternity to load.
“Come on!” Of course, this was the day they would force her to update her password, answer security questions, and wait.
The spinning wheel processed for an eternity.
Then the screen changed, and her racing heart stopped.
Pending Balance: ￡1,016.42
She stared in absolute shocked silence. A thousand pounds more than she had that morning.
Her vision blurred until the digits stopped making sense. But it was there. Right in front of her eyes. So she screamed.
Three heavy thumps pounded on the floorboards. “Will you shut the hell up! I got kids trying to sleep!”
Daisy covered her mouth and laughed. “Sorry,” she whispered, hugging her phone as she fell back on the bed.
“One thousand pounds!” she squeaked. It was the most money her account had ever seen. And it was all hers!
She shoved her face into the pillow and screamed again. If this was a dream, she never wanted to wake up.