Chapter 18 Seek #3
“No.” Tears welled in her eyes. She couldn’t lose her locket. She needed to go back.
She looked longingly at the tall yurt in the distance, aglow in veridian, beckoning to her like the long-lost Emerald City of Oz lured Dorothy.
A tear tripped past her lashes. Going back would end her.
She couldn’t. She was finally close to safety.
Walk away.
Turn around and put one foot in front of another.
She forced herself to take a step in the direction of the safe zone, then another until she was halfway over the footbridge. But she couldn’t go any further. Every step tore at her heart as if she were abandoning her mother, losing her all over again.
He was going to hurt her if he caught her again. Not only that, he’d want to punish her now.
She could safe word. She could find the locket and say the magic words, and this nightmare would end. So what if she lost the money? She’d already lost pieces of herself she’d never get back.
Daisy staggered forward, letting gravity edge her along. She wobbled from one side of the path to the other in a serpentine pattern drawn of weariness more than any sort of strategy. Her brain hurt from thinking.
Rubbing her scalp, she winced. When she pulled her hand away, her fingers were dark and wet, glistening under the moonlight with her blood.
When voices approached, she hid in the gardens. Sharp leaves sliced at her arms and face like tiny knives, but she was beyond flinching.
Blood welled from a cut on her cheek, warm and immediate, and she wiped it away. Her feet left dark smears on the pale stone path, but that would only make it easier to find her way back.
She was deep in the belly of a maze, alone and bleeding, utterly lost, when a twig snapped behind her. Daisy stilled.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” a man called out through the boxwoods. “End of the line, little one.”
Suddenly, another tribute burst through the hedgerow like a deer in flight. Her dark hair and wild eyes said everything that needed to be said. When she ran, Daisy ran.
The hunter continued to call out taunts. Daisy bolted into a crossing, where beanstalks curved into arbors and vines twisted wildly about large pieces of abstract art.
They hid in the shadow of an enormous sculpture of a harp. The dark-haired woman, younger than Daisy with raccoon eyes from where her makeup had smeared, wore a ruby red gown that had torn at the shoulder.
As Daisy stared at the tribute, she mirrored her stunned expression. What a pair. The lace edge of their bras showed with every deep breath, and they had enough leaves and twigs in their hair to start a forest fire. Her chest heaved with the same desperate rhythm as Daisy’s.
They stared at each other.
No words. Understanding passed between them that went beyond language.
The hunter called out again, the same taunting rhyme, “Fee-fi-fo-fumb, I smell a feisty one.”
The girl’s chin trembled. Tears cut tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
Maybe they could fight him off together. Maybe that’s what Daisy needed all along—an alliance.
Taking pity on the tribute, she reached out and grabbed her hand. But the tribute jerked her hand back as if Daisy had burned her. She looked at her the way Daisy looked at the hunters.
“It’s okay. I want to help you,” she whispered.
The tribute’s gaze dropped to Daisy’s blood-stained dress. “You’ll only get me caught.” Then she was gone, rushing off into the night and leaving Daisy all alone.
She deserved that.
Trust no one.
She couldn’t hold it against the girl for only doing what Daisy had done all along.
She waited behind the harp a while longer, but when her eyes got tired, she forced herself to move. The necklace couldn’t be far—
Hadrian Welles stepped out from the hedges with a smile that promised nothing quick, nothing kind, nothing merciful.
“Where were we?” He walked slowly, cracking his knuckles with each deliberate step.
Daisy staggered back, her shoulders pressing against the hedge wall. The branches prickled through the beaded silk of her gown, a thousand tiny warnings she had no way to heed.
Trapped.
“I remember—right here.”
Breath exploded in her lungs as his fist connected with her stomach before she registered the movement. The world folded inward, collapsing to a single point of white-hot compression beneath her ribs where sight and sound only whistled.
Her knees buckled. Gravel bit into her palms as she crumpled, mouth gaping like a landed fish, diaphragm seizing against a vacuum as she fell to her back and mouthed timber.
Copper flooded her tongue. The night sky wheeled overhead, stars smearing into streaks, as the mist turned to rain. Somewhere far away, a bell tolled. The wet rasp of her throat opened as she swallowed, forgetting how to breathe. Curling to her side like an animal curls around its wounds.
“Get up.”
Timber.
He kicked her side. “I said, get up!”
Her eyes welled, and her vision blurred. When he ordered her to stand a third time, and she didn’t move, he yanked her up by the arm.
Her legs tangled beneath her, and she spun, twisting her dead weight helplessly as he dragged her to her feet. “Stand up, you fucking slut.”
“Timber,” Daisy wheezed, falling back to her knees as he dragged her over the pebbled ground.
Her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. They were shaking violently.
“Timber. Timber. Timber.” Her voice was paralyzed with fear, her silent pleas lost on the breeze.
He dragged her to a lawn, the cold, damp grass forming a slick carpet beneath her back as he pulled her like a caveman towards a large stone.
“You had to run, didn’t you?”
He threw her over the flat surface of the boulder, knocking the wind out of her once more.
“Tim—bah—” She gasped.
He shoved her shoulders down and ripped her dress from collar to hem. Cold air covered her back as he shoved down the silk shorts at her hips.
Daisy scrambled for purchase, feet scraping to push up her legs, but he shoved her head down, forcing her cheekbone to smash against the stone.
“Don’t fucking move.”
She disobeyed, curling her shaking finger over her thumb in the sign of the letter T.
Metal clanked. Fabric rasped. Wiry hair grazed her shaking thighs as hard knees punched into her tensed muscles.
“You’re gonna bleed for what you did back there,” he growled, breath hot at her spine. “And I’m going to enjoy it.”
He wrenched her legs apart.
A sob tore loose. “Tim—”
“Shut up.” He drove her forward and shoved a hand between her thighs—claiming space, taking, forcing.
Daisy shrieked and bucked, but his fist cracked into her again—hard, brutal—this time at the back of her head. Stone smashed her face. White light detonated behind her eyes. Pain lanced through her skull, and blood flooded her mouth, copper-thick.
He hitched her hips higher, fingers biting into flesh. Time stuttered—flashing, jerking, skipping—as his weight pinned her down.
“Timber!” The word ripped from her raw throat, metallic and burning like fire.
Pressure surged as greedy, seeking hands burned her tender flesh. Daisy screamed again, body trembling violently as his suffocating weight crushed into—
“Move one more muscle and I’ll fucking kill you.” The words carved the night clean.
Everything froze so fast her stomach lurched.
Hadrian’s weight vanished, yanked back, leaving her fully exposed. Shaking and unstable, she rolled onto her back, arms snapping up to shield her face as jagged breaths ripped out of her.
Cold air knifed over her skin, rain needling every bare inch.
“Back up.”
Blinking through the rain, she stared at the shadowed figures. Confused and terrified.
Hadrian. And whoever stood beside him. Something glinted at his temple.
A gun.
Hadrian stood rigid with his fingers spread in surrender, hatred burning through his stare, pants half-fallen at his knees. Fury twisted his features.
Violent tremors shook Daisy’s body hard enough to make her teeth clack as she stared in awe at the man holding the gun to Hadrian’s head.
It was him.
The hunter from the balcony. The one she’d danced with earlier. The one who looked at her like something to devour.
He slid his hand into Hadrian’s jacket and withdrew a second handgun. Daisy’s breath hitched, then fell into a whimpering sob.
His eyes cut to her—steady, brutal calm. “You’re safe.”
No, she wasn’t. And his lie stung worse than the rain pelting her skin.
Her body shook in waves of shock as she shivered in the inescapable cold. Her dress lay in a muddied heap at her feet.
Men in black tactical gear swarmed the garden, dark and faceless. They poured out of the hedges, boots chewing up the wet lawn as they closed in.
Too many. One of them lunged toward Daisy, and she screamed and cowered, holding up her hand defensively.
“Don’t touch her,” the hunter in the emerald tux snapped, voice thick with command.
Everything stilled.
Hadrian glared sideways at the other hunter, hands still up. “What the fuck do you think you’re—”
The gun clicked.
“One more word,” the man said quietly, “and your brains are on the lawn.”
He tossed Hadrian’s confiscated handgun to one of the shadowed figures without looking away.
They weren’t hunters. They were something else. Something powerful and terrifying. Above the law. All six of them moved as one body. Synchronized. Elite. Forceful. And armed.
Her throat had closed to a pinhole as her chest caved in, ribs collapsing like wet paper. Too fast. She needed air, but couldn’t draw a full breath. Heart hammering in her skull, she looked up at them, terrified of whatever they planned to do to her.
She couldn’t think. Couldn’t speak. The sky tilted as shadowed faces swam closer, mouths moving, their words drowning under the roar of blood in her ears.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
She couldn’t.
Her fingers clawed at the slick, unmovable rock slab at her back as white noise swallowed her whole and panic pressed down on her chest like a boot.
What happens now? What will they do—
“Put him with the others.” The hunter shoved Hadrian, and three men surged, slamming Hadrian into the wet lawn and cinching zip ties around his wrists and ankles.
He looked at Daisy and holstered his weapon at the small of his back. His stormy eyes glinted with uncontained rage as he took two determined strides toward her.
Her back pressed against the wet stone as she cowered and blocked her face with raised hands. “No!”
He stopped.
Three men in tactical gear hauled Hadrian up and dragged him from the maze, his protests shredding into the rain. Three men remained behind the hunter, their eyes like knives cutting into her.
Daisy shivered, her full body spasming uncontrollably. Hair plastered to her cheeks. Blood seeped from her temple to her eye, a warm contrast slithering down her raw, frozen skin.
The hunter’s ring glinted in the moonlight—R.A.
She recoiled like a cornered animal when he took another step forward.
No exits. No room. Hedge walls. An endless night. Freezing rain. Unfathomable traps. This unholy place was without laws. Every inch of sophistication was a trick meant to stir a false sense of safety. A land that preyed on desperate souls with broken promises and broken men.
“Easy,” he said.
Another step.
His face hid in shadow, but nothing could disguise the power of his posture. Authority radiated from him in stillness, like a sheathed blade.
“You’re freezing.”
Daisy didn’t move.
He shrugged out of his jacket and held it out to her. “Take it.”
Trust no one.
He closed the distance, and the shadowed men behind him advanced too, tightening the circle. She whimpered, and he held up a stilling hand.
Breath punched from Daisy’s lungs in frantic bursts as panic bucked in her chest.
“Back up.” He never took his eyes off her.
The men took a uniform step back. He moved fast, catching her wrist in an unbreakable grip.
“No—” she choked, yanking back with everything she had, but he didn’t budge—didn’t even sway.
Unbreakable.
Daisy clenched her eyes shut and jerked back, smacking her shoulder against the rock.
“Stop,” he ordered, low and controlled. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
The jacket—warm and fragrant—draped over her trembling shoulders. Her fist balled between them, her eyes wildly searching his shadowed features.
“Stand up.”
It wasn’t a request. He pulled her up, but her legs folded as strength abandoned her.
He pulled her closer, and she shoved at his chest, weak and terrified. Her heart tripped into chaos when he refused to let her go.
“Relax,” he said, but she heard those words before.
Her body sagged when he overpowered her, panic swallowing her whole in a wave of darkness that took her away.