Page 164 of Kill Feed

Dante strolls back to my side, his shoulder brushing mine as he settles beside me. I let his warmth anchor me to the moment, something solid to hold onto while I watch the man I called a friend beg for his life.

One of the hunters scales the gate in a blur before stopping directly in front of him, barbed-wire whip already coiled in her hand.

“I love it when they beg,” she chimes.

She threads the wire through the fencing as her sister catches it from behind and feeds it back. Together, they pull.

The barbs bite into Lucas’s abdomen.

He jerks against the restraint as the wire tears through his clothes and catches his skin, darkening the fabric with blood while the twins steadily wrench it tighter and tighter.

He keeps pleading, keeps screaming, but his fate is already sealed, and I’ve seen enough to know he’s getting exactly what he signed me up for.

Chapter 44

Adrian

The building has gone unnervingly quiet.

For most of Kill Feed, there has always been something waiting beyond the next corner. Now there is almost none of it. The silence feels unnatural, as though the building itself is holding its breath, waiting to jump scare me around every corner.

We pass a body near the mouth of a corridor, and I glance down long enough to recognize it’s Jeremy before looking away. After that, there isn’t another dead or living person in sight.

I should be more unsettled by it. Instead, I feel more alert than I have for most of this game. Without the constant noise pressing against my thoughts, my mind finally has room to settle, and with it comes a strange sense of emptiness that I don’t particularly want to fill.

Especially because Dante is already there.

He’s walking a few steps ahead of me, and I find myself watching him rather than searching every doorway for something waiting to kill us. The blood on his clothes, the familiar shape of his shoulders, the way his hand hangs loosely beside him all feel strangely reassuring now.

I quicken my pace until I’m beside him. Our arms brush, and I stay close enough that our shoulders occasionally knock together as we walk, and when he glances sideways at me, I hold his gaze for a moment before looking ahead again.

For once, I don’t feel the need to put distance between us. I simply want to be near him.

Dante stops so abruptly that I nearly stumble. He tilts his head, listening. I slow beside him and strain to hear whatever caught his attention, but the corridor offers nothing beyond the low hum of machinery and the faint scrape of our own breathing.

Then his hand closes around my wrist. He pulls me sideways, dragging me through an open doorway just as a deep mechanical thrum rolls through the building.

The door slams shut behind us, trapping us inside a deadlock.

My stomach drops. “Are you fucking joking—”

“Relax.”

Dante looks completely unbothered as he glances toward the camera mounted in the corner. “Selene’s playing a separate game with us. She won’t let us die in here.” A faint smile touches his mouth. “It wouldn’t be entertaining enough.”

A deep sigh escapes me, fingers drumming against my leg.

This is fucking exhausting, and I’m not sure how much my body is able to endure any further. It’s been taking beat after beat, with its only fuel being adrenaline keeping its function.

My muscles ache, and a warm bath sounds fucking perfect right now… preferably with Dante, in his apartment. My mind fills with all sorts of scenarios, all while he has his gaze fixed on the camera like he’s waiting for a response.

Or a sign… or whatever the fuck he plans to do now.

“I tried to kill you,” is all I manage to say, despite the dozen other words crowding my throat.

“Oh, really? I didn’t notice,” Dante laughs, his attention settling back on me.

“It would’ve been worse,” I admit. “It would’ve been much worse if you died instead of Amani.”