He opened the door and I stepped into a small vestibule washed with red light flowing from a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. It illuminated a narrow staircase that led downward.
Not a supply closet. A basement.
A cold chill ran up my spine. Details about the Hunt had been vague. I only knew what I had to do to win and that winning meant getting the revenge I craved.
I knew what happened if I lost too. A risk I was willing to take.
But I hadn’t known it would take place underground and I hadn’t known I’d have to give up Rose.
“Last chance,” the big guy said behind me. He looked ominous in the red light glowing from the stairwell.
I started down the stairs and heard the door close behind me.
There was no music, no sound at all until I reached the bottom of the stairwell. Then I caught the murmur of voices on the other side of a door like the one at the top of the stairs.
I opened the door before I had a chance to change my mind and entered a small room lit red like the stairwell. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, to get a handle on what I was seeing: a group of women crowded to one side of the small room, a group of men on the other.
But not just men. Masked men.
They stood in groups of three, a montage of ink and muscles and piercings, their masks varied in sets of three: skeletons and reapers and creepy hockey masks and one threesome in scary-as-fuck masks that looked to be made out of animal skulls, the bone cracked and gilded, the snout elongated, a yawning maw of a mouth where the mask ended.
I shivered, wrapping my arms around my body as I joined the women. There were seven of them, in their early twenties like me, except for one, who looked a little older. Some of them were dressed in leggings and sneakers — ready to run — while others looked like they’d dressed for a night out with the girls.
I felt a swell of sympathy. They were going to struggle.
A folding table stacked with supplies stood against one wall. A handwritten sign over it readFIRST AID. Across the room by the men, another table stood, this one smaller and holding nothing but a clipboard.
On one wall, a digital clock glowed 24:00:00. A red neon sign buzzed near the ceiling.
No names.
No safe words.
No escape.
Jesus. Make it extra creepy why don’t you.
The door opened and the Barbarian who’d frisked me stepped into the room looking surprisingly normal compared to the men in masks. He walked toward one of the men in the bone masks, although calling him a man was like calling a wild stallion a pony. He was huge, a giant of a man with huge shoulders, biceps that bulged even as his arms hung at his sides, and thighs barely contained by his ripped jeans.
And his sculpted chest? Well, that wasn’t contained at all. It was completely bare, ink crawling across his exposed skin, shadowed words and images winding up his neck and over his shoulders.
The guard bent to say something to the huge masked man and my blood ran cold when the giant turned his gaze on me.
He nodded, then peeled off from the crowd and crossed the room to the door.
The girls in the room shrank away from him, edging away from the door like a herd of deer sensing a wolf.
He was imposing. Menacing.
But it wasn’t just his appearance that made my skin crawl. It was something else, a kind of vacuous energy that traveled with him across the room, his footsteps heavy in black boots not unlike my own.
He dropped a heavy wooden bolt over the door, the kind people used in horror movies to keep out the monsters, except I was pretty sure all the monsters were locked in the room with us.
“You almost didn’t make it,” the girl next to me said.
She was cute, with a perky nose and blonde hair tied back into a ponytail. She wore sneakers, leggings, and a body-hugging T-shirt, the halter straps of her sports bra visible around her neck.
Smart girl.
