That was the part Bram tried to keep tucked behind a veneer of cold and calculated discipline. But deep down, he wanted a reason to let out the monster he’d been carrying around ever since his parents had been killed in that car crash, ever since he’d been left to take care of Cassie all on his own.
As for me, well, I didn’t have an excuse. My parents were still alive, still married, my little sisters healthy and happy. We’d suffered no loss, no trauma.
I’d just been born this way. I’d stopped wondering why a long time ago.
The thrill of the Hunt heated my blood as I followed Poe deeper into the tunnels, the scent of strawberries winding its way through my body. We would find the dark-haired girl, bring her to the loft.
Then she would be ours to do with as we pleased.
7
MAEVE
I knewtwo hours had passed because of my phone and the occasional digital clock mounted to the walls of the tunnel. After I’d turned right, following the tunnels under the streets on this side of Main, I’d gotten increasingly disoriented. It was like being in space, or what I imagined being in space would feel like: dead silent, the isolation total.
I thought about the blonde who’d followed me deeper into the main tunnel before turning and I wondered how she was doing, if she was still in the Hunt or if she’d been caught.
I was surprised to find the tunnels weren’t all empty. Random objects were scattered throughout, abandoned and glowing under the red lights: stacks of wooden crates, rusted tools, even furniture.
And there were doors too, all of them metal and locked with padlocks, probably leading to the businesses aboveground.
Worst of all were the chains. Scattered throughout the tunnels, they hung from hooks in the ceiling, their links heavy, the iron rusted. That would have been bad enough, but at the end of each set of chains were a pair of thick metal cuffs.
I remembered the waiver I’d signed in the holding room.
I consent to be hunted.
I consent to be stripped.
I consent to be marked.
I consent to be owned.
The words haunted me each and every time I passed another set of chains. I’d consented to this. All of it. Now the only thing I could do was evade capture, outlast the men who were at that very minute hunting me in the tunnels.
I didn’t use the flashlight on my phone unless I needed it, worried about the battery, and I stepped carefully into the darkness beyond the red lights, holding my hands out in front of me to keep from smacking face-first into one of the tables, sets of chairs, or rows of shelves I’d seen pushed up against the walls of the tunnel.
I kept expecting to run into a brick wall, to reach the end of the tunnel system, but it never happened, and I was more than a little freaked as I walked deeper and deeper under Blackwell Falls.
I’d just stepped into the glow of another red light when I heard voices.
Male voices.
I stopped cold, listening, trying to gauge where they were coming from, and was surprised to hear them echo from the tunnels ahead of me.
That was something I hadn’t counted on, that the tunnels might intersect in more than one place, allowing the hunters to lap me, then double back on me from a different direction.
I stood still just long enough to realize the voices were getting louder.
Closer.
I moved back the way I’d come in a hurry, and for the first time since the Hunt began, I felt cornered. Assuming all the men hadn’t lapped me in one of the other tunnels, there were moreof them this way, but I couldn’t keep moving forward without running into the others either.
I didn’t know the rules of the Hunt for the men. Could any of them chase any of us? Or had there been something to the way they’d sized us up in the holding room, some kind of claiming?
I could hardly think it without feeling my cheeks burn. What would my educated, feminist parents say if they knew I was submitting to such an archaic dynamic, one where groups of men chased me through tunnels for the prize of my servitude?
I pushed the thought aside. My parents — my whole life — felt far away from the darkness of the tunnels. All except for June. She felt closer than ever, and I heard her voice in my head:don’t think about the ’rents, Maeve. Move your ass.
