Page 5 of Hunted

“Oh, shoot. I missed,” Seb crooned. “Next one won’t, princess.” His teeth flashed in a feral, lethal grin. He was enjoying this assessment entirely too much.

I couldn’t report him for any of it, though—not with his father as the Academy’s Commander—but I’d be damned if I didn’t give him a little dose of his own medicine in an equally unreportable way.

Dangling from the zipline by nothing more than a questionably secure carabiner, I reefed the dagger out of my shoulder with my right hand and cocked it back.

“Hey, Varco!” I called out. “I think you misplaced something.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” he growled, eyes alight with something more than malice, for once in his putrid existence.

“You should be more mindful of where you leave your things, asshole,” I said sweetly, flinging his dagger back at him with pinpoint accuracy, skewering his right thigh, just as intended.

Let’s see you run now.

I left Seb to his shouts of indignant fury and hauled my broken, bleeding body the remainder of the way across Widow’s Drop, onto the sharp, blue-tinged gravel of Sapphire Ridge.

I wanted nothing more than to lie down on the ground and have the rain wash my blood away—actually no, I wanted nothing more than a hot shower, but that wasn’t happening just yet. And neither was a brief respite, because resting for even a second could get me killed.

I had no interest in dying—not today or any other day. Steadfast resolve had gotten me through the last year-and-a-half of training, after the Academy had quite literally dragged me kicking and screaming off the streets and through its basement doors.

I was twenty-five then, and pretending I’d been doing better than I actually was, when a stereotypical, creepy, white van pulled up kerbside. The next thing I knew, a pair of strong, tanned hands yanked me in, right off the pavement in broad daylight, and somehow, no one was any the wiser.

I’d thought I was finally being apprehended due to my string of recent heists—everything from grocery stores to jewellery shops. Never more than they could afford to lose, and only enough to put food in my belly and pay the next bill on my crappy little apartment. I’d had nothing else but those four walls to my name when the Academy yanked me out of that life and into another, even more horrifying existence.

The police had no clue who I was, of course. They’d had no idea that a hungry, lonely young woman had been London’s master thief—but I guess the Academy had been watching.

And I guess I had skills they thought they could utilise.

I unclipped my harness and tossed it to the ground with the others. Seb was only twenty or so metres away, with malice in his gaze and venom on his tongue. No other motivation was needed to hightail it out of there.

I sped down the long, twisting dirt track, dodging claw-like branches I could barely see in the downpour. My shoulder pulsed painfully with every dogged step, and I knew with blood-chilling conviction that I was leaving a trail of blood behind me—the most macabre kind of breadcrumbs.

An agony-filled ninety seconds later, I reached the first obstacle down Sapphire Ridge: The Gaps. Ingeniously named after four gaps in the cliffside trail, each section was a little wider than the last. The first spanned a metre and a half with nothing but air below. Falling through was a fast-track to the bottom of the mountain, but you’d cop an instant fail because you’d be DOA: dead on arrival.

I leaped, hit the man-made steel platform, and peered across the second opening, two metres wide. With only a metre-and-a-half of ledge to work with, I backtracked as far as I was able, then took off. With a leap and a prayer, I cleared the span of missing track, landing with a tumbling roll that almost went too far.

“Fucking rain,” I swore through gritted teeth, cursing the weather, the wound, the assholes on my tail that would arrive any second, and that next goddamned gap. And then I cursed myself for wasting time cursing.

Four-and-a-half metres away, another metre-and-a-half of rain-slickened metal protruded from the rock face, leaving me with two less-than-stellar options:

I could make use of the rough, rocky wall to climb across. Given the state of my shoulder and the span of the last deadly gap, that would be a fool’s wager.

Or, I could leap onto the tiny, single square foot platform, positioned like a stepping stone smack bang in the middle of the gap. It had never been my first choice in any of our practice runs, but given that the last interval was six metres wide—and didn’t possess any handy stepping stones—I needed to save my shoulder for that climb.

The sound of snapping branches signalled that my lead time had disappeared. I prepped for another running jump, wincing as I heard Sebastos come barrelling around that last corner with Bodie and Eric in tow.

A whoop of malice came from one of the three, quickly followed by a shush.

“Wait!” Seb shouted—his voice uncontestably violent, impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. I half-froze, thinking he was addressing me. “I want to watch her fall.”

Nope, not me.

Not wanting to give him the satisfaction, I flipped him off, then clenched my teeth and jumped.

I knew I wouldn’t make it the second my feet left the platform. Instead, I crashed into the stepping stone tit-first, slamming into the frozen, rain-soaked steel with an agonised grunt. Clawing desperately at its surface, I tried to find some sort of purchase with both my line-mangled hands.

A chorus of excited howls rose from behind me.

“Yes!”