Chapter 14
Brooke
Idon’t feel like I’m in the room anymore.
Seth’s alive.
My breath shatters in my chest. Something inside me cracks wide open, too hard to contain. I can’t stop laughing. It echoes through the dining hall, cutting straight through the heavy silence.
All of them turn to stare.
Elliot’s face twitches, first in confusion, then irritation.
“What’s so fucking funny?” he rises slowly from his chair. “You think he’s coming for you? We’re off-grid, sweetheart. Even John doesn’t know where this place is.”
I keep laughing. It claws its way out of my chest like relief and fury twisted into one. They told me he was dead. They wanted me broken and hopeless.
But he isn’t dead.
He's fighting. He's coming for me.
Sophie leans in across the table, her smirk venom-sharp, arms folded like she is already bored. “That’s cute. You really think your boyfriend’s going to come save you.”
I look her straight in the eye, my laughter finally dying down, my voice hoarse from the scream that wants to follow it.
“Even if he is too late to save me,” I laugh. “He’s gonna fucking kill all of you.”
Elliot moves toward me slowly, savoring every step like he has all the time in the world. His boots click against the marble floor, the sound echoing through the cavernous dining hall. Every step closer feels like a countdown.
“Look at me,” he says.
I try to hold it in, but the laughter keeps bleeding out, shaky, broken, too loud in the silence he is trying to control. It isn’t joy. It is defiance scraping its nails down the walls of my throat.
He doesn’t like that.
His hand comes down hard on my back, right across the line of fresh stitches.
Pain explodes through my ribs, white-hot and instant, blinding enough to suck the air out of my lungs. A gasp tears from me before I can swallow it, and the laugh chokes off into silence.
He presses harder.
“There you go,” he murmurs. “Back with us.”
Tears sting at the corners of my eyes. One of the sutures has torn, I can feel it. A slow, hot burn blooms beneath the skin.
“Since you think Seth is coming to save you,” Elliot goes on, circling behind me, his voice low and disturbingly calm, “that puts a little fire under me. Makes me want to move things along.”
He leans down, and I feel his breath brush against the side of my face.
“John may act like he cares about you,” he whispers. “But he doesn’t. If you die, he’ll be annoyed. Maybe he’ll say something poetic about wasted potential. But one dead bitch isn’t going to topple The Collective.”
His fingers drag slowly up my spine, right over the torn sutures, making sure I feel every inch of it.
“You need to understand something, Brooke. No one is coming for you.”
My jaw locks. I don’t give him the satisfaction of an answer. I won’t.
“You’re mine now,” he continues, his voice softening. “Mine to break. Mine to cut open. And when I’m finished with you—”
He bends lower, his lips brushing the shell of my ear.
“I’ll send what’s left to Seth. In pieces… I wonder which parts he’ll want to keep.”
My stomach turns. A wave of nausea crawls up my throat.
But I still don’t look away.
Before I can react, Elliot strikes me again. His hand snaps across my back, landing directly over the torn sutures. Pain detonates through me, shredding through nerves until sound collapses into a strangled cry in my throat. My body jerks forward, helpless against it.
Elliot straightens and wipes his palm against his pants, like touching me contaminated him.
“Take them downstairs,” he says to the guards. “Cleaning time.”
Elliot pauses at the doorway and looks back at me.
“And Brooke,” he smiles, “I hope you’re ready for tomorrow’s game.”
Then he turns and disappears into the corridor, his laughter echoing faintly before the hall swallows it whole.
I stay where I am, shaking, pain ripping through my back, my wrists, my ribs.
But beneath the agony, beneath the terror, one truth burns through everything else.
Seth is alive.
And he is coming.
They can hurt me. They can cut me open. They can stitch me wrong and drag me through hell itself. But they have not broken me.
Guards seize us by the arms and shoulders, dragging us toward the stairwell. No one fights. No one can.
They drag us from the dining hall like animals. Two guards herd us through the corridor and down a narrow stairwell, the air growing colder and heavier with each step.
The basement reeks of mold, rust, and old suffering. The kind that lingers long after the screaming stops.
One of the guards, Enzo, waits at the bottom of the stairs, looming like a monument.
He is tall, thick through the shoulders, his black tux stretched clean across a frame built like a butcher’s block.
His face is blank and cold, like emotion has been carved out of him years ago.
The kind of man who doesn’t blink when things scream.
In his hands, he holds an industrial hose designed to strip concrete, not people.
“Strip!”
No one moves fast enough.
He tears clothing away with brutal efficiency, fabric ripping, skin exposed under harsh lights. We are shoved into a line along the wall, naked and shivering.
The hose roars to life.
He turns it on Jared first.
The water hits him so hard he gasps, stumbling back as the spray hammers raw skin. When Enzo angles it between his legs, Jared folds to the floor, hands shaking in instinctive defense.
“Get up!” Enzo barks, kicking his ribs until he does.
Sarah is screaming, the hiccuping, manic kind that comes from someone whose mind finally snaps. She keeps choking out her sister’s name.
Emma is crying so loudly it echoes.
Miles leans toward me. His voice trembles. “Who’s Seth Kincaid?”
I swallow hard. The hose hits Emma beside me and she shrieks, her skin going red instantly.
“That’s who’s going to save us,” My voice cracks, but I keep going. “Seth won’t stop until he finds me. He won’t leave you guys either.”
Miles stares at me like hope hurts.
“If he broke out,” I continue, “that means he’s in Colorado. It’ll take him a day or two to get here.”
Miles shakes his head. “I don’t know if we have a day or two. The others that were here before…they told me. The next is the card game, and the day after that is the last hunt.”
My stomach twists. “The last hunt?”
He nods grimly. “That’s when they get rid of most of us. They let us out into the forest wearing bright colors so we’re easy targets. Crossbows, guns, knives, chainsaws… anything. It’s how they clear space before the next shipment of victims.”
A cold wave rolls down my spine.
Miles leans toward me again, his voice shaking. “We’re running out of time.”
Seth has to get here before that.
Enzo reaches me.
“Come on,” he demands.
I don’t move fast enough. He grabs my arm and yanks me forward, ripping the last scrap of fabric from my body. I try to cover my stomach.
The hose hits my legs first. The pressure is so strong it feels like knives carving upward along my shins, my thighs, my hips.
“Move your hand.”
I don’t.
He steps closer. “Move it, or I’ll move it for you.”
I bend forward instinctively, trying to shield the small swell of my lower abdomen with my ribs, turning so the full force won’t hit my stomach.
He doesn’t like that. He angles the spray up my torso.
The water slams into my breasts and white-hot pain explodes through my chest. The spray makes me scream before I can stop myself.
Enzo laughs, amused.
I bite my lip so hard blood fills my mouth.
He walks behind me.
“No,” I whisper, bracing.
The pressure hits the stitched wounds across my back.
Agony rips through me so sharply my vision blurs. I drop to my knees as one of the stitches snaps.
“Oops,” Enzo chuckles lazily. “Physician’s going to love me today.”
Water pools around me, red swirling into pink as it washes off my skin. My whole body trembles from the pain and the cold and the humiliation.
I close my eyes.
Seth, please—Find me.