Compared to the females of his kind, she was weaker and slower. She would not survive a single blow from a Hyrakki warrior. She had no claws, no armor, and no venom. How did humans survive at all?
But she didn't break.
She bent. She bled. She fell.
And she got back up.
Every. Single. Time.
The pressure in his chest shifted, sharpening into an ache.
More than interest. More than the biological imperative of the Hunt.
Want.
He wanted her.
The realization should have unsettled him. Should have sent him searching for logic, for reason, for all the ways this was impossible.
Instead, something in his chest unclenched.
For the first time in longer than he could remember—longer than the wars, longer than the cycles of empty Hunts and emptier nights—Makrath felt something he had stopped allowing himself.
Hope.
Fragile. Dangerous. Easily shattered.
But there.
She could still fail. Candidates who showed promise in training often shattered the moment the Hunt began. He had been disappointed before.
But watching her rise one more time, bloody and battered and refusing to stay down?—
He thought maybe this one might be different.
He would watch. He would wait. He would see what she was truly made of.
And if she proved worthy...
His claws flexed against the ruined console.
He didn't finish the thought.
He didn't need to.
CHAPTER 15
The aircraft banked low over the coastline, and Serafina got her first real look at Costa Rica.
Jungle stretched beneath them in an endless carpet of green: emerald, jade, viridian, broken only by the silver threads of rivers cutting through the canopy and the occasional plume of mist rising from valleys so deep they looked like wounds in the earth. Mountains climbed in the distance, their peaks shrouded in cloud, and beyond them, barely visible through the haze, the Pacific glittered under the morning sun.
It was beautiful and ancient, and utterly indifferent to her.
"Welcome to Costa Rica," Morgan said from the seat beside her.
The aircraft—not a helicopter, not a plane, a craft somewhere between that moved with a silence that still unnerved her—descended toward a clearing carved into the mountainside. As they dropped below the treeline, the jungle closed around them like a fist, swallowing the sky.
The compound emerged from the green. Low buildings, built into the slope rather than imposed upon it, their surfaces mottled with camouflage that made them nearly invisible from above. The buildings blended into the slope so completelythat from above, there would be only jungle, unbroken and untouched. The only exception was the landing pad they touched down on, a circle of dark material that absorbed light rather than reflecting it.
