4. Audrey
AUDREY
The man with the clipboard stalked toward us like he was in no hurry. His gait was disconcerting, the pace of an animal who knew its prey was already cornered.
My pulse quickened as his bull mask came into closer focus. This wasn’t the kind of bull I’d seen standing on the side of the road, eating grass.
Primal and animalistic, the copper mask gleamed under the amber lights, its eyes narrowed in a vicious scowl, pointed teeth emerging from under a long wide snout with flared nostrils.
I half expected the man to paw the ground.
To charge.
And there were other details I hadn’t noticed from across the room.
For one, the man was older than I’d first thought.
It was hard to tell his exact age with the mask, and when he came to a stop in front of us I saw why I hadn’t noticed his age from across the room: his body was muscular and defined, with broad shoulders and biceps that flexed when he glanced at the pages on the clipboard.
A massive tattoo was etched onto his chest: an oak tree, its many branches stretching up and over one shoulder, its roots reaching under the waistband of his well-worn jeans.
I was mesmerized by his brass belt buckle, and I tried to focus on the symbol hammered onto its surface — something that looked like a C flanked by two vertical bars — instead of the bulge of his dick.
An unfamiliar flutter of desire pulsed between my thighs, an area of my body that had been all but dead for years, ever since I’d started to realize how much trouble Ella and I were really in with Dean.
The wood handle of a knife protruded from a leather sheath around the bull’s still-trim waist, and his boots looked like they’d seen plenty of real-life work.
Everything about him made me think of the outdoors: big skies and meadows humming with insects, water running over river rock and trees rustling in the wind, the smell of wild grass in the summer and hay in the fall.
Which was weird, because I didn’t know this man from Adam.
His gaze traveled dispassionately over us, and I wondered if it was my imagination that it caught on my face like a jagged fingernail snagging a loose thread on a cashmere sweater.
“Welcome to the Hunt.” His voice was deep and gravelly, and I had a flash of rumpled sheets and cigar smoke, whiskey in a glass. What the fuck was wrong with me? “You’re all here because you want a favor. We’re here because we want to hunt. So let’s go over the rules.”
The girls around me shifted on their feet, like they were just realizing the Hunt was real. Like the man’s imposing presence had brought home what they were signing for.
“The Hunt lasts for twenty-four hours,” he said.
“There are clocks throughout the tunnels marking the time. During that twenty-four hours you will be hunted by the team that claims you. If you’re caught, you’re owned for the next three months by the team that catches you.
If you remain free when the clocks reach zero, you’re entitled to an…
act of service from the team that tried and failed to catch you. ”
An act of service.
That was a nice way of putting an execution. Maybe I’d try to think of my plans to murder Dean that way from now on: an act of service. For Ella, who was in danger every time she was with him and for all the other women Dean had hurt in the past, all the ones he might hurt in the future.
“What if we change our minds?” The question came from the pink-haired girl with the pixie cut. “About the Hunt or about the… other thing.”
“You can change your minds about the Hunt for the next five minutes, right up until I finish reading the rules. After that, you’ll sign the consent form and the door will be locked.
” His gaze swept over us. “As for the act of service, that’s up to you.
If you manage to stay free for twenty-four hours and then decide you don’t want what you’ve earned, well, that’s your call. ”
The girl chewed her lip and I was glad I wasn’t the only one who still wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. It was a big deal, what we would be asking.
What we would be doing.
And we would be doing something. I wouldn’t lie to myself and pretend that enlisting someone else to kill Dean meant I wasn’t responsible.
As a doctor, I’d taken an oath to do no harm.
Not those words exactly — those words weren’t written in the original Hippocratic Oath but in another text by Hippocrates — but more or less.
Enlisting someone to take a life — any life — went against everything I believed in, everything I’d devoted my life to doing.
But my instincts as a doctor were nothing compared to my instincts as a mother.
I’d do whatever it took to protect Ella, even if it meant violating my oath not to hurt anyone.
Even if it meant enlisting someone to kill her father.
“We’ve left water for you throughout the tunnels,” the masked bull said. “If you get hurt, you can come back to the holding room and make use of the first aid station, but— ”
I huffed out a laugh before I could stop myself and the bull stopped talking and locked his gaze onto my face.
“Something you’d like to say?”
I’d been falling into the lazy cadence of his voice, but now it held an undercurrent of cold steel.
A shiver ran up my spine but I forced myself to meet his eyes behind the mask. “‘First aid station’ is generous.”
He glanced at the table littered with first aid supplies before turning his attention back to me. “Looks like everything you’ll need for a minor injury.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “What if the injury isn’t minor?”
He didn’t waver. “Then you’d probably need more help than we could give you with a few drugstore supplies.”
Touché.
“Anything else?” he asked.
I hesitated, then shook my head.
"The holding room is a safe zone,” he continued. “You won’t be hunted if you come here to make use of the…” He glanced back at me. “… first aid station, but if you’re still here when the timer ends, you lose.”
“Is there a map?” A brunette with a nose piercing asked. “In the tunnels?”
“No map,” the bull said.
“I’ve heard the tunnels go on forever,” she said. “What if we get lost?”
“Then you’ll be found.” There was a dark promise in his voice that should have scared me.
Instead I felt the wet slide of desire between my thighs.
“What about the bathroom?” I asked.
He swiveled his head to look at me, and I was almost positive I caught the hint of a sigh.
It was a surprisingly normal sound. A surprisingly human sound. The sigh of a public speaker who was beginning to understand that the most engaged member of his audience was actually a huge pain in the ass.
“No bathroom,” he said.
“We can’t go twenty-four hours without using the bathroom,” I said.
I was vaguely aware of Madison, still standing next to me, staring at me like I was crazy, silently urging me to STFU.
“There’s no plumbing down here,” the bull said. “You’ll just have to make do.”
“Make do,” I grumbled. “Easy for you to say.”
It was a lot easier to whip out a dick and pee than it was to crouch and walk around with damp underwear for the rest of the night.
“This is a hunt…” His blue eyes glittered like frozen steel. “… not a hotel.”
The rebuke stung, and I bit my lip with a frown.
I’d put myself through med school, had gone more than 48 hours without sleep while working on trauma patients that required the most attentive of care.
I’d been demeaned and harassed by male colleagues.
I’d volunteered in two war zones, had hung my ass over a ditch to pee, to take a shit, had used hand sanitizer in lieu of water for so long my skin had cracked and bled.
This asshole clearly thought I was some kind of princess who expected first-class facilities because I was asking about a matter of basic hygiene.
Well, fuck him and the horse — or whatever — he rode in on.
“Anything else?” he asked, his gaze locked on mine.
I hesitated, wishing there was, wishing I had something to say that would explain who I was, what I’d been through.
What I was capable of.
“No.” I was proud of the fact that my voice didn’t waver even though I was shaken, both by the insinuation that I was a weak little woman and by the fact that I cared at all what this hulking masked man thought of me.
“Good.” He walked to the pink-haired girl at one end of the line and held out the clipboard. “Each of you will sign this consent form. Then the doors will be locked and the Hunt will begin.”
The pink-haired girl took the clipboard, hesitated, then signed.
The bull made his way down the line, moving the signed forms to the back of the stack before handing the clipboard to the next girl.
My heart hammered in my chest as he got closer to me.
I told myself it was because I was reaching the point of no return, the point at which I’d sign the form, give myself over to the possibility that I’d be caught by one of the masked teams, forced to provide sexual favors — and who knew what else — for the next three months.
But really it was him: the man in the bull mask who quickened my pulse, who made me wonder if my body wasn’t as dead as I’d thought.
I had to force myself to breathe when he stopped at Madison. He was even bigger up close, the oak tree inked onto his body more detailed, crawling over the sinew and muscle of his body like it had grown there.
I was almost sure I could smell him, a combination of sweat, hay, and something musky and animalistic that ran through my body like a primitive aphrodisiac.
More than that, I could feel him. Even with my gaze averted, his presence reverberated like an echoing chord, thrumming through all the hidden corners of my body.
I tried to focus on Madison, on the fact that she signed the consent form without hesitation. I wondered what had driven her to the Hunt, who she wanted dead.
And then the bull was standing in front of me, looming over me like a mountain, ageless and immoveable.
He held out the clipboard, holding my gaze as I reached for it.
But he didn’t immediately relinquish it. He forced me to tug, to wrest the clipboard from his hand as if he was asking the question I’d been asking myself ever since I’d decided to join the Hunt.
Are you sure?
No, but I have no choice.
I stared into his eyes, refusing to give him the power to make me look away first, until he let go of the clipboard.
He didn’t say a word, but I could almost hear his sandpaper voice.
So be it.
I looked down at the clipboard to read the consent form and found it shockingly brief.
I consent to be hunted.
I consent to be stripped.
I consent to be marked.
I consent to be owned.
The words, like something out of some sick medieval game, should have stopped me cold.
Instead another pulse of heat — of need — throbbed in my pussy.
This was so fucked up.
I hesitated, then thought about the question Madison had asked me on the way in to the holding room.
Is whatever brought you here still out there?
The answer was clear as day. Dean was still out there. The frightened girl Ella had seen in Dean’s office had been real. The boxes of women’s belongings I’d found in his storage unit had been real. Dean’s response when I’d confronted him had been real.
And if everything else was real, so was the danger to Ella.
I signed my name to the consent form and handed it back to the masked bull towing over me.
For a long moment, he didn’t move. Didn’t speak.
Then he barked out an order as he crossed the room.
“Lock the door.”