Chapter 15
Caleb
Istrip off my shirt, tossing it onto the chair beside the console. My pants follow. I'm already half-hard thinking about what comes next—Scarletta navigating the maze blindfolded, my voice in her ear, the hunt playing out exactly as she wrote it.
Three months of planning. Every bamboo wall measured to match her manuscript. Every portal archway calibrated to disorient her in precisely the ways she described. The monster costumes cost forty thousand dollars each, custom-fabricated prosthetics that would make Hollywood jealous.
My boxer briefs come off, my hand going to my cock automatically.
How I will fuck this girl today.
What she got from me so far… it's nothing compared to how I'll take her in the center of the maze. I picture her on her knees, my cock buried in her mouth, The tip pressing against the back of her throat—
A scream cuts through the monitors.
I turn, frowning. She's barely started. The first capture isn't supposed to happen for another eight minutes minimum, and even then, the attendants know to build the tension slowly, to let her hear them before they touch her.
This scream is wrong—pitched too high, ragged with genuine terror rather than the delicious fear we've been cultivating all day.
My eyes find her feed, and my brain simply stops.
The image doesn't make sense.
I stare at it, waiting for the visual to resolve into something rational, something that fits within the parameters of what should be happening on my island.
There's a man in the maze.
A man who is not one of my attendants.
The build is wrong, the posture is wrong, everything is wrong. He's covered in mud, caked with it, and he's dragging Scarletta by her hair through the dirt while she screams.
"Red! Red!"
Her voice tears through the speakers, and the word hits me like a physical blow. She's safewording. She's actually safewording, and the man—whoever the fuck he is—doesn't stop.
He kicks her. He kicks her in the ribs and she crumples, and I watch her mouth form the word again, desperate, pleading.
Time dilates into something thick and syrupy.
The cameras. The glitches I dismissed. The digital artifacts and blur on the Chaff Island feeds that I attributed to humidity and scheduled for maintenance.
My head snaps to the secondary wall of monitors. Volk's feed. The body is still there, face-down in the mud, covered in fire ants exactly as it should be.
Except.
The body hasn't moved in hours. Not a twitch. Not a single involuntary spasm from the venom coursing through his system. I'd noticed it earlier and assumed he was dead or dying, but now—
I zoom in on the Chaff Island feed, and the image stutters. Pixelates. Reforms.
The resolution is wrong. The shadows don't match the current position of the sun. The timestamp in the corner reads correctly, but the light filtering through the jungle canopy is at least two hours off from where it should be.
Loop.
Someone looped my fucking cameras.
My gaze returns to the maze feed, to the mud-covered man with pale eyes who has my Scarletta by the throat now, and the pieces click together with the precision of a closing trap.
Dimitri Volkov isn't dead in the jungle.
Dimitri Volkov is in my maze.
Time snaps back into focus.
I'm moving before my conscious mind finishes processing.
The control room door crashes open and I'm sprinting through the jungle, my bare feet hitting roots and rocks and I don't feel any of it.
The undergrowth tears at my legs. I'm naked.
I'm fucking naked and unarmed and Scarletta is in there with a man who has spent fifteen years trafficking children, a man who knows exactly what happens to people who cross me, a man with nothing left to lose.
The maze entrance looms ahead. I designed every inch of this labyrinth. I know the optimal paths, the portal archways, the dead ends. I can reach the center in four minutes if I run the correct route.
I round the first corner at full speed.
A body lies crumpled against the bamboo wall.
The monster costume is still mostly intact—the elaborate prosthetic clawed gloves, the voice modulator hanging loose around what remains of his neck. But his head is gone.
A scream rips through the air behind me. Female. High-pitched. Not Scarletta—the timbre is wrong, the accent different. It's coming from the direction of the preparation pavilion, at least half a mile back.
Another scream answers it. Male this time. Deeper in the jungle, toward the eastern shore.
The sounds multiply, overlapping, a chorus of terror spreading across my island like wildfire.
How long?
The question burns through my skull as I vault over the headless body and sprint deeper into the maze.
How long has Volk been free?
The camera loop was sophisticated. Professional.
Not something he could have improvised from inside a cage on Chaff Island.
Someone helped him. Someone with access to my security infrastructure, someone who knew the camera protocols well enough to insert a seamless recording without triggering my redundancy alerts.
I mentally calculate the timeline. The glitches started approximately six hours ago. I noticed them, dismissed them, moved on. Six hours is enough time to swim the channel between islands if you're desperate and strong.
Another scream, this one truncated sharply into silence.
I run faster, my lungs burning, my mind racing through the implications. Volk didn't just escape. He planned this. He had inside help. He turned my hunt into his hunt, and now he's loose on an island full of staff and attendants who weren't prepared for a predator.
But none of that matters.
None of it matters because Scarletta is somewhere in this maze with him, and every second I spend calculating is a second he has his hands on her.
I hit the first portal archway and don't hesitate, plunging through into the disorienting darkness that deposits me thirty yards deeper into the labyrinth.
The mud here is churned, disturbed. Fresh drag marks cut through it like wounds.
I follow the trail.
I plunge through the second portal, the disorientation lasting only a heartbeat before my feet hit solid ground. The maze walls blur past as I sprint, my mental map updating in real-time—two turns left, then the center opens up.
Scarletta's screams have changed.
They're wild now. Primal. The kind of sound that comes from somewhere deeper than fear, somewhere that touches madness. Each one drives into my chest like a blade, and I push harder, my legs burning, my lungs on fire.
I round the first turn.
Her screams fracture into something worse—a keening wail that rises and falls, rises and falls, the rhythm of someone watching horror unfold and being unable to stop it.
Second turn.
The bamboo walls fall away and the center platform spreads before me, exactly as I designed it—the circular clearing, the raised platform covered in banana leaves, the ground-level eye bolts for restraints.
Scarletta is on her knees in the mud.
She's covered in blood.
My heart stops. Actually stops. The muscle seizes in my chest and for one infinite second, I am nothing but frozen terror, staring at the red coating her skin, her hair, her face. So much red. Too much red. The color of arterial spray, of opened arteries, of death.
Then my eyes process what they're seeing.
The blood isn't hers.
It's splattered across her in patterns that don't match wounds—cast-off from something else, from someone else. The dark-haired attendant lies three feet from her, his throat opened in a ragged smile, his chest still twitching with the last electrical impulses of a dying nervous system.
Volk stands over him, a hunting knife in his hand, and when he sees me, he smiles.
He spits on Scarletta. A thick glob of phlegm lands in her hair, and she flinches, her wild screams dying into hitching sobs.
Then he looks up and points at the sky, shouting something in Russian.
I hear it now. The distant thrum of rotor blades cutting through air, growing louder.
A helicopter.
He's being rescued.
The pieces fall into place with sickening clarity. The insider help. The looped cameras. The access codes. Someone arranged extraction, someone with resources and reach, someone who knew exactly when and how to pull Volk off this island before I could finish what I started.
Volk's smile widens. He thinks he's won. He thinks that helicopter changes the equation, tips the scales back in his favor, gives him leverage.
Oh, hell the fuck no.
The rage doesn't hit me like a wave. It settles into my bones like ice water, cold, and clear, and absolutely still. My heartbeat slows. My breathing evens out. The world narrows to this moment, this clearing, this man.
I begin to circle.
Volk tracks me, the knife held loose in his grip, professional. He's killed before. Probably many times. But he's killed the weak, the helpless, the children he trafficked and the witnesses he silenced.
He's never faced something like me.
The helicopter grows louder, but I calculate distances automatically. The only viable landing zone is the runway near the preparation pavilion—nearly a mile through dense jungle. Even at a dead sprint, whoever's on that aircraft won't reach us for at least twelve minutes.
This will be over in three.
I keep circling, and when I speak, I speak in Russian. His mother tongue. The language of his nightmares.
"Ty dumal, chto uydyosh', Dimitri?" The words slide out smooth as silk. My Russian is perfect. "I'll tear out your heart and make you watch me eat it."
His smile flickers.
I continue in Russian. "First I'll cut off your balls. Slowly. With a dull knife. Then I'll shove them down your throat and watch you choke."
I keep moving, a slow orbit that forces him to turn, to track me, to take his eyes off Scarletta for seconds at a time.
"You trafficked children for fifteen years. I know every name. Every face. When I'm done with you, they'll only find pieces."
Volk's jaw tightens. The knife shifts in his grip.