2. Audrey
AUDREY
“Spread what now?”
The other guy, scrawny and sporting a Blackwell Blades tattoo, laughed. “Your legs.”
“Spread my legs?”
What can I say? I was used to asking questions, getting things right.
“They have to make sure you’re not carrying any weapons.” Madison said, like she was explaining TikTok to an elderly neighbor.
This was getting embarrassing.
I hesitated, then took a step forward and widened my stance. The big guy’s pat-down was thorough but clinical.
He removed the two protein bars from the back pocket of my jeans and studied them with a snort of humor.
I frowned. “What’s so funny? Twenty-four hours is a long time.”
The last thing I needed was a blood sugar crash.
He shook his head and handed them back to me.
“She’s good,” he said, turning his attention to Madison.
“I can keep my phone?” I’d left everything else in my car, but hadn’t been sure about the phone. I was never without it, both because of the hospital and because I never slept easy when Ella was with Dean for the weekend.
“Won’t work down there anyway,” Barbarian Tattoo said, stepping away from Madison.
My stomach turned over. I’d never been incommunicado with Ella — or with Dean when he had Ella. What if there was an emergency?
The smaller guy opened the door to a contained landing and a set of narrow stairs leading downward. A single bulb cast the confined space in yellow-orange light.
“Maybe this is a mistake,” I said.
Madison put her hands on my shoulders, and I flinched at the intimate gesture.
“Is whatever brought you here still out there?” she asked.
I thought about Dean, about what I suspected.
About what I’d found.
I nodded.
“Then you can do this,” she said.
It was my first time getting a Gen Z pep talk, and I had to say, it wasn’t half bad.
I stepped through the door.
I was on the second step, Madison behind me, when I heard the slam of the door at the top of the stairs.
Now we were shut in the stairwell with the smell of musty carpet, trapped by closed doors at the top and bottom of the stairs.
“Have you ever done this before?” I asked Madison.
She gave a wry laugh. “No, but I have a friend who did.”
I stepped off the stairs at the bottom and waited for Madison by the closed door. “What happened to her?”
“She got caught a few hours in, spent three months with the guys who caught her.”
“And how was that?” I asked as she joined me at the bottom of the stairwell.
“Mixed bag.” Madison reached back to tighten her ponytail. “She had to… you know, do stuff with them but she didn’t have anywhere else to go anyway.”
I sighed. How many women over centuries had been forced to do things they didn’t want to do — trade their autonomy, their freedom, their very lives — to survive in a world that wanted to control them?
Millions? Tens of millions?
I’d done everything in my power to make sure I wasn’t one of them. I’d gone to the right schools, had become a doctor for fuck’s sake.
And here I was, risking everything to keep my daughter — and myself — safe.
Madison reached for the door knob. “Ready?”
I nodded.
She was right: the threat that had driven me to the Hunt was still out there. I’d tried lawyers. Had thrown what little money I had (thank you, student loans and malpractice insurance) at the problem.
Nothing had changed.
The Hunt was my only hope.
She opened the door and I was met with a wave of cold air and the smell of concrete. It made sense when I stepped into a small room with a cracked cement floor, the same orange-gold light washing over four girls huddled on one side of the room.
And they weren’t alone.
Across the room, studying the girls like animals on the prowl, stood a group of men in masks.
My body recoiled at the sight of them: a cluster of terrifying demons, spiders, masked hockey players, wolves, skeletons, and freaky-looking clowns.
It was like stepping into a living nightmare, and I had to fight against the urge to run, the danger clanging in my body, the scream of alarm echoing in my mind.
“Come on,” Madison said, leading me toward the group of girls.
Our greetings were hushed, like we were in a library instead of an underground room preparing to be hunted by these… animals.
Because that’s what they looked like: great beasts torn from the darkest of fairy tales, monsters with horns and gaping mouths, horror-movie serial killers who’d stepped through the screen.
And another thing? The girls were all younger than me.
A lot younger.
Most of them looked to be in their early twenties, and I wondered what had brought them here, what had made them so desperate at such a young age that they would submit to such a strange and terrifying ritual.
The door opened and another woman entered, this one in her mid-twenties with a pink pixie cut and ears that glittered with piercings.
She scanned the room and joined us.
No one exchanged names — we wouldn’t be together long anyway — and I was glad Madison had told me hers. Knowing her name made me feel like I had a friend even though in an hour we’d be running through the tunnels alone.
Some of the girls murmured to each other, shifting nervously on their feet as they wondered what would happen next. I used the time to look around, get the lay of the land in the small space that seemed to be a pre-Hunt holding room.
It was about as big as my living room in the apartment I shared with Ella when she wasn’t with Dean. Except our living room was cozy and warm, and this was….
Not.
The walls were stone, probably original to the tunnels I knew had been built under Blackwell Falls during Prohibition, all the better to ferry illegal alcohol to the bars and restaurants that had populated Main Street in the 1920s.
A folding table littered with familiar supplies — gauze, Band-Aids, antibacterial ointment, a bottle of rubbing alcohol — stood on our side of the room. I resisted the urge to snort at the haphazardly written sign above it.
First Aid my ass.
Hope lifted in my chest at the sight of the cases of water stood stacked next to the First Aid table. Clearly the men in charge weren’t totally oblivious to our safety, our needs.
Then again, what kind of men hunted women for fun? What kind of men were willing to kill a total stranger as the price for losing a game?
Because that was really what this was: a game, for the men at least (I didn’t feel like I had a choice, and I had a hunch the women around me felt the same way).
Across the room, another table stood between the crowd of masked men. The clipboard on its surface looked out of place, like a calculator in an Egyptian tomb.
My gaze was drawn to a short hall leading from the holding room toward a closed steel door. Above it, a digital clock glowed in the same orange-gold that lit the holding room.
24:00:00.
Twenty-four hours. That was how long I had to stay out of the clutches of the men who were going to hunt us.
I thought about Ella, hoped she was safe, hated that I had to rely on hope when she was with her dad. Then a door opened in the hall leading to the digital clock and I froze along with all the other girls.
My mouth went dry as three new men started toward the room where we stood like lambs waiting for slaughter.
The men were huge, their heads almost grazing the ceiling, their broad shoulders threatening to wedge their bodies in the doorway leading to the holding room.
Ink crawled over their bare chests, winding over chiseled muscle as the men entered the holding room.
Their thighs were barely contained by their jeans, and I was surprised to feel the unfamiliar flutter of desire between my thighs.
The other men looked like underground monsters.
But these men? These men were larger than life, too imposing to be contained by the tunnels. They belonged outdoors under open skies, empty space stretched out all around them.
The orange-gold light glinted off the elongated forehead of their hammered copper mask, and horns arced outward above wide slanted eyes that gave the impression of angry menace, the animal’s snout thick and wide.
Bulls.
That was what they were: terrifying, threatening bulls, the kind that would paw at the ground, their gaze hardening in the moment before they charged you.
The moment before they gored you like a lesser animal.
They stalked into the holding room, and I shrunk back when I realized one of them was staring at me, a hand on the knife sheathed at his waist, his eyes glittering with anticipation behind his mask.
I’d been wrong to think of this as a game.
Because as the Bulls took their place among the men across from us in the holding room, filling the space like a pack of wolves cornering their prey, I knew I was about to find out exactly why it was called the Hunt.