echo
The east property looked different without hundreds of drunk students filling the lawn.
The house sat dark against the trees except for the lights Ronan had left on downstairs, and beyond the back terrace the property disappeared into several hundred acres of woods.
I had been here once before for one of Hunter’s end-of-year parties, but I had never bothered learning the land because there had been nothing worth hunting on it. Tonight there was.
Malakai met me inside with the kind of energy that said he had been waiting for this almost as long as I had.
Ronan was seated at the dining table with two laptops open, one cycling through camera feeds while the other showed a map of the property and a moving tracker farther out in the woods.
Before either of them could start explaining every part of what they had built, I dropped my keys onto the counter and asked how long Nichlas had been gone.
Malakai told me a little over half an hour and added that he had started slowly because of his leg but picked up speed once he reached the trees, while Ronan turned the tracker screen enough for me to see it and offered the location if I wanted it.
I shook my head and told him to keep it because I wanted to find Nichlas myself, and neither of them argued.
Ronan gave me only what mattered before I left.
Nichlas had started north, cut west around the creek, and doubled back once before disappearing into heavier cover.
The tracker was live so they would know if either of us reached the property boundary, but they were not going to interfere unless something went catastrophically wrong.
Malakai looked like he wanted to say more, probably about how much thought he had put into choosing the property, but one look at me stopped him.
He understood that the gift had already been given.
I did not need him standing beside me while I opened it.
I left my jacket across the back of a chair and stepped outside with the knife still strapped against my hip.
Moisture had already settled over the grass, and Nichlas’s first path across the lawn was easy enough to read even in the fading light.
His right foot had dug deeper in several places where he compensated for the injury in his thigh, and once he reached softer ground near the trees, the drag of that leg became more obvious.
He had not been trying to hide yet. He had been trying to get distance before I arrived, which meant the fear had started before he ever heard me behind him.
The woods made him more careful. Pine needles covered some sections, old leaves layered others, and the creek created enough background noise to hide smaller movements if he knew how to use it.
I found a freshly broken branch less than fifty feet in, but the damage was too obvious to trust without looking farther.
The trail continued another twenty feet before disappearing completely, and when I doubled back I found the shallow depression where Nichlas had stepped between two exposed roots and changed direction.
A darker smear marked the edge of one leaf.
I rubbed it between my fingers and smelled blood before wiping it against my jeans.
He had remembered more than I expected.
At Westbridge, Nichlas had known enough about me to be useful.
He could predict which professor I would approach instead of threaten, which student would fold if I leaned on the right family problem, and which route I took through campus when I did not want anyone noticing me.
He had watched the favor ring grow from petty exchanges into something half the school relied on without understanding how many pieces I kept outside the ledger.
He had been good at staying beside me, though.
Good enough that some of those old observations had apparently survived everything else.
Nichlas headed toward the creek and used it better than I thought he would.
His first set of prints stopped at a flat rock near the bank, and the obvious assumption was that he crossed there.
I followed the water upstream instead and found the place where he climbed back out on the same side, leaving only a scuff in the mud and one broken reed.
Farther down, he entered the water for real and stayed in it long enough to interrupt the trail.
I stood at the edge listening to the current, looked at the slope on the opposite bank, then followed the terrain instead of his footprints and picked him up again where he had dragged the bad leg over a root.
The longer I followed, the more he tried.
He cut through brush thick enough to hide the blood leaking through his dressing, climbed over a fallen trunk instead of circling it, and used a shallow drainage cut to change direction without leaving much on the higher ground.
One false trail held me for nearly a minute before I realized he had doubled back beneath the tree line.
That made me smile because I had wanted a hunt, and for the first time since he betrayed me, Nichlas was finally giving me something close to what I asked for.
His body was starting to betray him even while his brain improved.
The spacing between his tracks shortened, and the blood appeared more often where the bandage on his thigh rubbed against branches.
Near the drainage cut, I found the print of his knee in the dirt where he had fallen hard enough to catch himself with both hands.
One of the hand dressings had opened too, leaving a faint red smear across a rock where he pushed himself upright.
I crouched beside it for a few seconds, imagining the panic that must have hit when his leg failed beneath him, then moved away from the trail entirely.
Following directly behind him would eventually tell him too much about where I was.
I cut wider through the trees instead, using the higher ground that ran parallel to his direction until I could see movement below through the branches.
Nichlas was maybe eighty yards ahead, limping badly but still making decent time.
He looked over his shoulder twice and saw nothing because I had moved above him rather than behind.
I could have closed the distance in a few minutes if I wanted to end it there, but ending it had never been the point.
I stepped deliberately onto a dry branch.
The crack carried through the trees, and Nichlas froze so quickly I saw the movement all the way from the ridge.
His shoulders locked first, then his head turned slowly as he searched behind him.
I stayed where I was until his eyes finally found me between the trunks, and when they did, I lifted one hand.
He ran.
Fear stripped the caution out of him. Branches snapped behind him as he forced his way downhill, and the injured leg started landing harder because survival mattered more than pain now.
I gave him enough time to build distance before following, keeping my pace controlled while his became increasingly desperate.
By the time I crossed the creek after him, I could hear his breathing on the opposite side.
He had slipped climbing the muddy bank and left blood across an exposed root where one damaged hand caught his weight, but he had kept moving anyway.
I slowed again once I reached the other side.
Nichlas had started listening for me now, and every time my footsteps disappeared he lost a little speed because he could not decide whether the silence meant I had fallen behind or moved closer.
I used that against him for the next stretch, letting him hear me when I wanted him moving and going quiet whenever I wanted him thinking.
Twice he stopped long enough that I could hear him trying to control his breathing, and both times I waited until he started convincing himself he had gained ground before moving again.
The old shed appeared through the trees ahead, half swallowed by darker growth along the southern edge of the property.
Nichlas remembered it from the party. I knew that because his trail angled toward it even though the ground there was harder on his leg, probably with the hope that the maintenance paths behind the structure would lead somewhere useful.
They did not. One curved back toward the creek and the other eventually narrowed into brush before reaching the property boundary, but Nichlas did not know that yet.
By the time I reached the shed, he was gone from sight.
I circled the structure slowly instead of following the first disturbed patch of grass, checking the ground near the back wall where someone had crouched recently.
The blood there was fresh, and a flattened fern showed where he had put weight on one knee while catching his breath.
He had rested close enough that I probably could have heard him if I had arrived a minute earlier.
The light had almost disappeared beneath the trees now, which made sound more useful than sight.
I moved farther past the shed and listened to the woods settle around me.
Water moved somewhere behind me, branches shifted overhead, and then I caught a scrape so small it would have meant nothing if I had not already known someone nearby was trying very hard not to make one.
I kept walking.
Nichlas had tucked himself somewhere behind me, probably between the shed and the thicker growth where the ground dipped enough to hide a crouched body.
I did not turn toward the sound. Instead I let my steps remain heavy enough for him to follow, moved farther left between the trees, and continued until there was enough distance for him to believe I had missed whatever hiding place he chose.