Chapter 14
Scarletta
The maze entrance rises before me like something that shouldn't exist outside my own head.
Bamboo walls stretch fifteen feet high, woven so tightly I can't see through them, can't cheat by glimpsing what waits inside. The archway is exactly how I described it in the story—rough-hewn wood covered in carved symbols that look ancient and vaguely threatening.
He built this.
The thought won't settle properly in my brain.
He read my unpublished nightmare fantasy and built it into physical reality.
I stop walking. The earth below my feet is smooth, powdery, and deep. Like here, on this island, even the dirt is controlled by the unmasked man's obsessions.
Torches flicker in iron sconces on either side of the entrance, casting dancing shadows across the bamboo. The air smells like smoke, and jungle rot, and citronella—reminding me that this isn't real. This is theatre.
Very expensive theater.
Insanely expensive theater.
For me.
The archway seems to breathe in the firelight, and I notice speakers hidden in the carved wood, positioned exactly where I imagined Helix's telepathic voice would originate from. A small basket sits on a pedestal just inside the entrance, containing what looks like wireless earbuds.
My pussy clenches at the sight of them.
He's going to be inside my head.
The Call of the Labyrinth comes back to me like an old friend…
I stumble, falling. My chest hits the hard dirt and the air flows out of me in a loud breath. For a moment, I can't breathe. I just lie there, unsure what just happened. The claws, the teeth, the horns!
He was a monster!
Touching me, groping me!
His fingers between my legs and… oh, God.
The throbbing is back. the wetness pouring out of me like—
Trees rustle somewhere behind me.
I shake myself out of the ridiculous fantasy inside my sick head, pull myself up, and find… a maze?
What the fuck! I want to screams this, but I don't dare. He'll hear me. Capture me.
And then what will he do, Lyra?
Fuck me…
Stop it! You're a sick piece of shit! It's not even human! It's an animal walking on two legs, nothing more!
And he's going to rape you if you don't snap the fuck out of what's happening here and pull yourself together!
I push the panic and arousal down and force myself to focus. The maze entrance rises in front of me like a mouth waiting to swallow me whole.
Behind me, the monster approaches. His footsteps are wrong and heavy. He's not running. He doesn't need to run. He knows exactly where I am.
I look up at the carved archway, at the symbols I don't understand, and I realize I don't know where I am. I get to my feet, spinning around, desperate to understand
"Little Lyra." His voice echoes through the trees, through my skull, through my bones. "Did you think I'd let you go?"
Blinking, I snap out of the scene. A scene that's so familiar, even four years after writing it, I know all the words. Every detail, every turn of the maze, every plant, every monster waiting inside.
It was… my first sick fantasy.
The first sign of my disgusting perversion.
Letting out a breath, I look over my shoulder.
The jungle path behind me is empty. No footsteps. No monster.
It's not sick.
Not like this.
It's just… fun. That's all. It's fun. Safe, consensual, dirty—I smile a little. Because it is definitely dirty.
But it's a fantasy I had.
Have.
Still have.
And I want to live it.
I don't care what that says about me, I want to live it.
I know the rules of the maze. I wrote them.
Three monsters hunt the labyrinth. If one catches you, they claim you.
And by claim, I mean grope, finger, fuck. Whatever they want.
Lyra gets caught by each of them. Is violated each time, and comes each time. Her arousal a betrayal of her body. But she enjoys it. I know this because I wrote her.
Am… her.
The unmasked man already let it slip that the monsters are the attendants. I'm sure they'll be scary—wearing costumes. But they've already proved they can easily arouse me.
I'm going to enjoy that to the fullest. I can't wait to be caught.
It's probably just as wrong to enjoy this attendant gang-bang as it was to write a whole story about a girl who wants to be raped by monsters, but… whatever.
Helix is in the maze too, and I assume that part is being played by the unmasked man. The center holds a portal that promises escape. The portal is a lie.
In my story, Lyra learned this the hard way.
I step toward the pedestal and lift the basket with trembling fingers. Inside are two wireless earbuds and a strip of silk the color of dried blood.
A blindfold.
In the story, Lyra wasn't blindfolded. She was blinded—a plant squirted purple powder into her face the moment she entered.
Temporary. Terrifying. She stumbled through the first quarter of the maze with her eyes burning and useless, guided only by the monster's voice in her skull as he 'helped' her try to outrun the monsters.
Of course, this was also a lie.
Helix wanted to watch Lyra be caught. He wanted to watch her struggle. He wanted to see if she could take their cocks, their claws, their teeth.
Because every one of those things on him, was going to be worse.
Am I scared?
Slightly. But in a good way.
In the end, I'm going to get what I came for.
My deepest, darkest desire made real.
I pick up the blindfold, holding it in my hands as I notice a rope anchored to the right side of the entrance, thick and rough, disappearing into the maze at waist height. A small card hangs from it on a string:
If you get lost, follow the rope. It will take care of you.
Take care of me.
What does that mean?
Does it lead to the center? To him? To one of the monsters?
There's no way to know.
I'm smiling when I put the ear buds in and they come to life with the sound of heavy breathing. Wet and throbbing when I tie the blind fold on.
The breathing fills my skull, like something alive pressed against my ear from the inside.
Then the whisper comes.
"Welcome, my little slut."
My pussy clenches so hard my knees nearly buckle.
"You are about to have the experience of a lifetime."
His voice is everywhere. Inside me. Around me. The earbuds seal out the jungle sounds completely—no birds, no wind, no rustling leaves.
Just him.
"When you're ready, take eight steps forward."
Eight steps.
Eight steps.
In the story, Lyra took eight steps before the purple powder blinded her. Eight steps into the mouth of the maze before she lost her sight and had to trust the monster's voice to guide her.
I'm already blind.
Already trusting.
I take the first step, and the powdery earth shifts under my bare foot like it's been waiting for me.
One.
"That's it, little slut. Keep walking for me."
Two.
"Do you know what I'm going to do to you when I catch you?"
Three.
"I'm going to spread you open on the altar at the center of this maze."
Four.
"I'm going to make you beg for my cock while you're still crying from what my monsters did to you."
Five.
"I'm going to fuck every hole you have until you forget your own name."
Six.
"Until the only word left in that pretty head is Master."
Seven.
My breathing is ragged now, each inhale catching in my throat like a sob. The blindfold presses against my closed eyes. The darkness is absolute. The voice is everything.
"Until you understand that you were made to be mine."
Eight.
I stop.
The air feels different here. Heavier. The bamboo walls must be close on either side—I can sense them even without seeing, the way the sound of my own breathing changes in the enclosed space.
"Good girl."
The praise hits my clit like a physical touch.
"But before you can become mine, you must prove yourself worthy."
Worthy.
The word echoes through four years of shame and longing and desperate late-night writing sessions. The word I gave to Helix. The word I made Lyra earn through blood, and come, and terror.
My whole body is trembling.
"Ready, little slut?"
I nod, even though he can't see me. Even though maybe he can. Even though I don't know anything anymore except that I want this.
I need this.
The silence stretches for one heartbeat. Two.
Then he screams it:
"RUN, LITTLE SLUT! FIFTEEN STRIDES!"
A growl explodes through the earbuds—guttural, inhuman, close—and I'm running before my brain catches up to my legs, counting strides through the darkness, heart slamming against my ribs, the monster's snarl chasing me through my skull.
I run.
Not the clumsy, terrified scramble I expected—something else. Something that feels like flying through darkness, my feet finding the powdery earth with impossible certainty.
My brain is counting, but my body already knows. Already remembers.
The walls brush my shoulders—I feel them, the rough bamboo catching briefly on my skin as I squeeze through. Exactly how I wrote it. Exactly how Lyra did it.
"Ten strides left, little slut."
His voice fills my skull, but I'm already adjusting my trajectory. Already angling left for the gentle curve that leads to the second corridor.
He replicated it.
He fucking replicated it.
Every measurement. Every turn. Every goddamn stride count from a story I wrote.
Seven. Eight. Nine.
The growling in my ears shifts. Hungrier. Wetter. Snarling like it wants to eat me.
Ten.
Something sharp catches my hip just as the masked man's voice yells, "Five strides right!"
I gasp—a high, startled sound that doesn't feel like it belongs to me—and my stride falters. The sting is immediate, bright, real. Not theatrical. Not pretend.
Blood. I can feel it. A thin line of warmth sliding down my thigh.
It cut me.
A claw. An actual fucking claw.
Of course it cut you, Scarletta. This is Max Fear Factor. This is the real deal. This is—
Thirteen.
Shit! I was supposed to turn!
I just keep running, desperately trying to map the maze in my head as, again, something snags my skin!
My thigh this time. I scream, it hurts!
What the fuck!
The first capture doesn't happen until—
I slip on something—mud! Why is it muddy? There's no mud! A moment later, I'm on the ground, face first. Dirt in my teeth.
The snarling in my ears is so loud, the fall so unexpected, the pain in my hip so real—I… I can't do this!
I rip the blindfold off, and find… nothing.
Nothing behind me. Nothing in front of me.
It's just me in this mud and… I look down.
My brain stutters for a moment. Because there's something wrong with it. Something very, very wrong with it.
It looks like… blood.
I look at my hip, my thigh—blood is flowing out. It's trickling down both sides of my leg.
But… it's a trickle and the blood underneath me is… a puddle.
Slowly, I turn my head.
And I scream…
Because on the ground, in his own puddle of blood, is the face of the blonde attendant, blue eyes open, his body… no where to be found.
I scream—a raw, throat-tearing sound that echoes through the maze—and in the exact same heartbeat, I register movement behind me. Too close. Too fast.
Before I can even think to scramble away, thick fingers tangle violently in my hair, yanking hard enough that white spots burst across my vision. The pain is instant and electric, radiating from my scalp down my spine.
Then I'm being dragged.
I'm hauled backward like a sack, my heels scraping uselessly against the earth as whoever has me pulls me down the narrow path.
My fingers claw at the ground, trying to find purchase, trying to stop this, but there's nothing to grab onto except slick mud and the rough edge of bamboo that tears at my palms.
"This isn't how it happens!" I scream, my voice cracking with hysteria. The words tear out of me, desperate, pleading. "This isn't how it goes! Red!" I shriek it like a prayer, like an incantation that might somehow undo whatever nightmare I've stumbled into. "Red, red, red!"
My captor's response is immediate and brutal—a bare foot slams into my ribs, knocking the air from my lungs in a painful whoosh. The impact sends me rolling sideways into the mud, and for a second all I can do is gasp like a fish on land, trying to remember how to breathe.
When I finally manage to drag my eyes upward, squinting through the pain and the film of tears blurring my vision, I see him properly for the first time.
And he's wrong.
This man—this person looming over me with one mud-caked foot still raised—is someone I have never seen before.
Not one of the three masked attendants I was expecting. Not anyone from Caleb's carefully constructed fantasy.
He's older, maybe in his fifties, with a weathered face that speaks of years lived hard.
His skin is smeared with thick mud that's dried in patches, flaking off in places to reveal pale flesh underneath.
But it's not just mud covering him. There's something else—something dark and sticky coating his arms, his chest, glistening wetly in the dappled light filtering through the bamboo.
"Who... who the fuck are you?" The words tear out of me in a ragged scream that doesn't even sound like my own voice anymore.
His face is caked in so much filth I can barely make out his features—just those pale blue eyes blazing out from beneath the grime, utterly devoid of anything human. Cold. Predatory. Evil.
When he speaks, it comes out as a guttural growl, harsh syllables that scrape against my ears like broken glass. I don't understand a single word, but the cadence, the harsh consonants—they sound suspiciously like... Russian?
My brain short-circuits trying to process this. Russian. Russian. What the actual fuck is happening? This wasn't part of the script. This wasn't part of any of it.
"Red!" I scream again, my voice pitching higher. "Red, red, red!"