Page 44 of Hunted

I froze. Ice crept through my veins in lieu of blood and needles prickled down my spine.

Fuck.

“Put down your weapon and turn around slowly, or I’ll have Eric shoot you with the gun he has trained on you right now.”

“What game are you playing, Sebastos?” I asked, pursing my lips, my mind whirling rapid-fire through all my current options.

I quickly came to the conclusion that there weren’t many.

With my finger still on the trigger, I pretended to do what Sebastos demanded, hoping like fuck no one else would pay for this. I reached down, gun parallel to the floor, and twisted slightly to peer behind me.

Varco wasn’t kidding. Eric’s tree-trunk legs filled my periphery ninety centimetres away. He even had the audacity to whistle as I bent over in front of him.

Second mistake, dickfingers.

The first was that he thought holding me at gunpoint was in any way effective or safe for him.

Instead of placing the gun calmly on the floor as he expected, I shot twice roughly in his direction, then took off down the hall. The scream of agony and subsequent thud of a body hitting the floorboards informed me at least one of my bullets had torn through Eric’s flesh.

Once around the corner, though, I floundered. I had seconds at most to ascertain a good hiding place, at least until I worked out what happened to the rest of my team. And to my instructors, I guess.

I ignored the somersaulting of my heart at the thought that I was potentially the only person left—but no. Pearce would have stopped the assessment if his brothers went down. He’d have personally seen to it that they were okay, and if not, he’d be the first in here, avenging them.

Since no alarm had sounded and the fake compound was still dimly lit, I figured that if nothing else, Beckett and Lockwood were still alive. Which meant that they could be hunting me too—along with Sebastos or whoever he’d sent after me thumped down the same hallway.

Remembering perhaps the only place I could go from our first run-through, I took the first right, then darted into the room. It contained nothing but an empty dining table and mismatched chairs, and over in the far corner, the same dummy hostile I’d taken out in round one.

Thankfully, the person following me chose the room on the left first, giving me precious seconds to get into position. Moving swiftly and silently, I holstered my gun, climbed onto the table, and pushed both hands through the ceiling. Or more accurately, through the manhole cover in the ceiling, conveniently placed directly above said dining table. I knew it was intentional, but I also hoped Seb was too stupid to see it.

The door crashed open just as I placed the cover back down, the eerie drawl of my pursuer drifting up to where I lay still—barely breathing—mere feet above his head.

“Little bird, little bird… come out, come out, wherever you are.”

I repressed the shudder that longed to tear down my spine.

“You can try to hide, that’s fine. Makes the game a little more interesting, doesn’t it?”

The sounds of tossed furniture echoed through the ceiling.

“I will find you, birdy. And we’ll have a grand old time when I do.”

The door slammed shut behind him, and thudding footsteps lumbered back down the hall, heading in the direction of that central room Eth was supposed to clear.

Counting to five, I finally dared to breathe, my breath fleeing in a shuddering exhale.

That was entirely too close. I didn’t dare think about what Sebastos would do in a heavily supervised assessment, with his father right there… he didn’t seem to mind. He was spurred on by the presence of daddy dearest, and I didn’t want to consider the ramifications of that.

Girls were Swallows—not Eagles.

I shook my head, though it took precious seconds longer to convince my fingers to unfurl. Crescent-shaped divots appeared like welts in the palms of my hand, right above the mostly-healed zipline welts, and only the thought that Pearce or Commander Varco or some tech guy down below was watching my freak-out in live action successfully shook the panic from my system.

Upon rolling over, I noted that the fake compound was incredibly realistic. There was a whole network of crawlspace above the rooms below, mirroring their layout. The only thing missing between them were walls, which made moving through them a whole lot easier.

Thank fuck I’m small, I thought, shimmying beneath shiny silver ductwork that lay like lines on a map between rooms.

I moved slower the closer I got to that central space, where Seb’s hostility was muffled but getting louder with every passing second.

“Give me the codeword, professor,” he snarled, followed by a distinct thump.