Chapter 3
RYKER
It’d been three days since I’d walked out of rehab.
Three days since I’d stood in my living room pretending to be someone worth welcoming home.
The Ritual didn’t exist on any map. No website, no address, no reviews.
Forty minutes outside the city, tucked behind a service road that didn’t show up on GPS.
You got in because someone who trusted you brought your name to the right person.
Mitchell’s eyes gleamed under the harsh fluorescent lights. “No rules exist here except one.”
“I got it. If I catch her, she’s mine to do whatever I want with.
” I leaned on the check-in desk, my fingertips tracing the worn edge of the laminate countertop.
The Ritual gaming location smelled of sweat and cheap cologne.
I wasn’t just here to play. I was here to feel something sharp enough to cut through the fog that had held me captive for months.
Mitchell clicked the mini locker shut, my car keys and phone disappearing behind brushed metal.
My hand hovered a second too long, like my body expected someone to slap restraints on my wrists.
The hollow sound echoed in my ears, too similar to the hollow sound of doors that used to lock from the outside.
I forced my lungs to keep working, drawing in a shallow breath that tasted of desperation.
They’d taken my freedom before, and here I was handing it over again, one small metal box at a time.
“Remember, you never saw this place.” His attention darted to the unmarked steel door behind him, then back to me. “Collin vouched for you, so don’t make him regret it.”
I agreed, recalling the tremor in Collin’s legs during group therapy when he’d whispered, “You look like someone who needs more than meetings.” He’d leaned in closer, voice dropping low.
“There’s a place where you can hunt. Real prey.
No rules. No consequences.” I couldn’t tell if that was compassion, or a salesman’s pitch to get me into trouble.
Sitting in those rooms had never fixed what was wrong with me.
The meetings taught me how to sit still.
Revenge taught me how to survive being alive.
The corded muscles in my legs twitched with anticipation as Mitchell handed me the course map, its edges worn soft from countless sweaty palms. I traced the winding paths marked in faded red ink, the X marking her starting point circled twice with desperate pressure.
Not my handwriting. It was too frantic, too deep.
I inhaled, already catching phantom traces of her scent—vanilla and something metallic.
Then the feelings cut off. Dissociation.
A trick I’d learned to survive. It was the only kind of power they couldn’t take from me.
It was my new drug. The only time I felt nothing, and my sanity depended on it.
I slipped through the back door and into the woods.
Shadows dappled the forest floor, the canopy overhead filtering the late, chilled, afternoon light to a murky gray.
I rolled my shoulders back, feeling the satisfying pop between my shoulder blades.
Three hours of sitting at my computer had turned my legs to concrete.
Restless energy crawled through my hands, and my tongue pressed to the back of my teeth.
I climbed the slope, boots crunching over dead leaves, the air hanging still and heavy around me.
No voices carried through the trees, no snapping twigs betrayed movement, only the occasional bird call.
Five acres. Multiple players. One prize.
Somewhere off to my left, a laugh cracked through the trees. It was close. My focus sharpened into something territorial.
I didn’t stretch to warm up. I did it to remind my body it still belonged to me.
A flare whistled overhead, painting the sky red for three heartbeats before it died.
I launched forward, counting breaths—in for three steps, out for two—while scanning the ground.
Twenty yards ahead: a mud pit, six feet across.
I veered left. Fifty yards: a net trap, its edges barely visible beneath scattered leaves.
I leapt over it. To the left: a flash of nylon rope half-buried in leaves.
A low-hanging branch raked across my forearm, leaving three parallel welts.
A serrated oak leaf slashed my cheek, the sting sharper than the clarity that came after my last hit of oxy in the rehab facility.
The world narrowed to the steady percussion of boots against dirt until …
splash. A hesitation in the creek’s babble, fifteen feet to my right.
Something heavy had just disturbed the water.
I dropped to a crouch. Thump-thump-thump-thump. The sound of distant footfalls and muffled laughter told me the other men had started in the opposite direction. Good.
The map’s creases had shown a ravine cutting through the north edge. Loose rocks. Slippery mud. The kind of terrain where ankles snap. Most would avoid it. Apparently not her.
Gravel cascaded beneath me as I skidded down toward the water. My shoes squelched across the creek bed, water bit at my skin and numbed my feet inside soggy socks. Tiny splashes peppered my calves.
A fern snapped back into place.
Between two birch trees: a flash of skin above a mud-caked shoe, dark hair swinging like a pendulum as she ran. When she glanced back, a pale slash along her jaw flashed through the shadows.
She was fast—Jesus, faster than I expected. But people always thought speed would save them. They never figured in old-fashioned endurance. The course was an equalizer, not a game of sprint and done.
I waited. Watched. She zigged left, then right, using a deadfall for cover.
My prey knew every trick. She doubled back, slithered beneath a fallen log, left a scrap of her olive-green shirt snagged in the bark.
That wasn’t panic. That was strategy. The moment I recognized it, I stopped hunting to win and started hunting to make sure no one else got to her.
I slowed, grinning. She wanted me to follow. I swiped the fabric, tucked it in the waistband of my jeans, the cloth warm from her skin. It wasn’t proof. It was a token. Maybe that should have bothered me, but it didn’t.
She was close. I could smell her. Sun-warmed stone, sweat, something sweet on the back of my tongue. My chest tightened. I crushed it before it could make a sound.
I saw her at the base of a ruined water tower, chest heaving, knees mud-streaked.
She was lean with an athletic build, her hair in a long ponytail, and the muscles in her arms flexed as she swiped away loose strands from her cheek.
Her tank top clung to her sweat-soaked skin, her small but perfect tits heaving with her ragged breaths.
I circled wide, my pulse drumming against my eardrums as I tracked her movements. Her grip locked on the ladder rungs, yet each foot found its place without hesitation, like someone who’d climbed through darkness before.
She hesitated at the third rung, listening, her breath creating small clouds in the cold air.
I shifted my weight, and her head snapped toward the sound.
For half a second, our gazes locked. She didn’t scream.
Didn’t freeze. Instead, her jaw set in a way I recognized from hunting with Ella and Holland.
That moment before they took the shot that never missed.
I waited until she climbed three more rungs before I made my move, slamming into the ladder so it juddered, an iron tuning fork.
Her laughter ricocheted off the metal, but she didn’t stop climbing.
At the top, she perched like a gargoyle, legs splayed for balance, her skin shining in the sickly glow of a battery lantern.
The lantern was already there, strapped to a beam with tape and grime.
I hauled myself after her, the rungs slick under my palms. When I crested the platform, she was already at the far side, one foot on the rail. Taunting me.
I pressed the button on my wrist band, signaling that the game was over. She was mine.
I lunged, and she dodged, but I was faster. I caught her by the wrist, spun her against the semi-rotted plywood. Her breath hitched, then steadied. She looked at me, her brown eyes wide and bright.
I tightened my grip, watched the tendons jump in her neck.
She didn’t look away. Her stare was filled with hunger.
I pressed her back, pinning her wrists to the splintered timber.
Heat spiked through my veins, bone-raw and primal.
She struggled, enough to make it count, and I gave her just enough slack to writhe, never enough to get free.
I yanked her hands above her head and used my knee to jam her thighs apart, letting her feel the full weight of me, the intent. She flashed me a wolfish smile before she spat in my face.
I laughed. Wiped it off with the back of my hand, then dragged my thumb down her cheek and smeared the spit into her skin like war paint.
“You like it rough, don’t you, little fox?
” Little fox. Not because she was delicate or timid, but because she was sharp and watchful, the kind that calculated instead of froze, that made the trap look like it was hers all along.
There was nothing predictable about the woman I’d pinned against the splintered wall.
I tightened my grip around her wrists, feeling the delicate bones shift beneath my thumbs.
Tomorrow, violet-blue rings would encircle her skin. My signature, my claim.
The cotton of her shirt surrendered with a satisfying tear when I yanked it upward, a rusty nail catching the hem.
The cold air raised an army of goosebumps across her exposed flesh, her nipples tightening to peaks.
I descended without mercy, teeth grazing the sensitive curve where her neck met her shoulder as she arched against the rough plywood, a gasp escaping her parted lips.