He wasn't grudging. He wasn't testing her to see if she measured up to some arbitrary standard.
He was waiting for her to become this. Waiting for her to stop holding back.
Then he was gone. Melted into the shadows between the trees, vanished like he'd never been there at all.
Serafina stood in the clearing, heart pounding against her ribs, the veth'kai still raised and ready.
She was smiling.
She couldn't help it. The grin spread across her face, fierce and foreign. When was the last time she'd smiled like this? When was the last time she'd felt this alive?
The woman who left Los Angeles was dead. She had died somewhere in this jungle, somewhere between the first nightand now, and a predator was being born in her place. A predator with teeth. A woman who claimed space, demanded what she wanted, embraced being dangerous.
She didn't mourn the loss.
She thought of Aria. Of Angelo. They would never know what she had done here, what she had become. But they would be safe. She would make sure of it. Not by playing by rules that were rigged against her. By becoming a creature the rules didn't apply to.
What the hell is happening to me?
The question surfaced, distant and almost irrelevant. She knew the answer now. The armor had prepared her body. The Hunt had prepared her mind. And he, the shadow in the trees, the predator who watched her with hunger—he had shown her what she could be if she stopped being afraid.
She lowered her weapon and pushed deeper into the jungle, following the trail he'd left for her. The anger still burned in her chest, but it was different now. Cleaner. A forge fire instead of a wildfire, shaping her into someone new.
For the first time in her life, she wasn't running from anything.
She was running toward.
And whatever waited at the end of this hunt, she was ready to meet it.
CHAPTER 22
By the fourth morning, the jungle felt less like a prison and more like a hunting ground.
She wasn't just pursuing anymore. She was hunting.
Three days in the jungle had changed her. The detective who had boarded that aircraft in Costa Rica—the woman weighed down by debt and duty and the grinding exhaustion of a life that had stopped making sense—felt like a distant memory. Someone else's skin. Out here, there was only the hunt. Only the predator she was becoming.
She knew his patterns now. Had spent three days learning them, cataloging his movements, anticipating where he would go. He was testing her, she understood that. Leading her deeper into the island, seeing how she adapted, how she thought.
Well. She could think too.
She found the ravine mid-morning: a narrow cut in the volcanic rock, walls too steep to climb easily, funneling toward a dead end where the stone closed in. Perfect.
She didn't set an ambush this time. That hadn't worked, and she learned from her mistakes. Instead, she worked the terrain, driving him toward the ravine with carefully placed signs of herpresence. A footprint here. A broken branch there. Making him think she was ahead when she was actually circling behind.
Funneling him toward the dead end.
It almost worked.
Almost.
She was in position, weapon raised, watching the ravine mouth, when a shift registered in her awareness. Not a sound,more like a change in pressure, a shadow falling where no shadow should be.
She looked up.
He came at her from above.
She'd forgotten the canopy. Stupid. Three days watching him move through vertical terrain, and she'd still thought like a ground-bound creature, still planned for a predator that played by her rules.
