“I understand.”
Aunt Vanessa squeezed her hand once more, then released it. “Go on then.”
Daisy hesitated, looking down at Jack as he was still engrossed in his conversation. “Can you tell Jack I went back to his room?”
“Of course.”
Daisy climbed the remaining stairs without looking back.
The upper corridor stretched before her in muted silence. Sconces flickered along the paneled walls, casting warm pools of amber across the carpet. The noise of the great hall softened with each step, fading like music heard through water, until only her own breathing and the whisper of her satin flats accompanied her.
She tried to remember the route. Left at the tapestry. Past the library. Through the long gallery with the arched windows. Jack’s suite was at the far end, beyond the corridor lined with oil paintings of hunting scenes she hadn’t appreciated the first time she passed them.
She walked slowly, letting the silence settle around her like a shawl as the finality of the night finally took hold.
It worked. For all its horror and excess, the Feast of the Fallen had actually worked. A stunning realization that made her smile, thinking back to how silly she had thought herself the first time she typed that web address.
Possibilities like this should only live in fairytales. But what did she know? It had been a twisted road to get here, but she made it, safe and sound.
One night. One fortune. Total transformation.
The horrible, beautiful truth was it only succeeded because society had failed to protect them. Without people as desperate as her, there could be no tributes. And without privilege, there could be no reward. The corruption wasn’t in the game. It was in the DNA of man. They all wanted to play, but not every man had the means to set his true nature free for a day.
Yes, the risk was grotesque. But the reward was life-altering.
Jack thought himself a bad man, but she disagreed. He created an infrastructure that used evil instincts to create something good. Ten years of tributes had their lives forever changed for the better because of him. They owed Jack everything.
Her heart swelled as she dared to think what this actually meant for her. Her mother would get the resting place she needed. Daisy’s debts would dissolve. The flat in Dagenham with its damp walls and broken radiator would become a memory instead of a prison. All because a man with a good heart left an emerald envelope for a desperate stranger to find.
She turned the corner into the long gallery. Soft morning light spilled like golden honey through the arched windows in pale rectangles across the floor, alternating with stretches of deep shadow. The hunting paintings watched her pass with oil-dark eyes. Horses frozen mid-gallop. Hounds with bared teeth. Stags collapsing beneath the weight of arrows.
Her footsteps slowed.
The corridor ahead was darker than she remembered. Two of the sconces had gone out, or been turned off, leaving a long stretch of blackness between her and the far door. The carpet swallowed the sound of her steps.
She stopped walking.
Something felt wrong.
Not a sound. The air shifted.
Daisy’s pulse ticked faster. She listened. Nothing. Just the faint groan of old timber settling and the distant, almost imagined murmur of voices from the floors below.
She was being ridiculous. The estate was emptying. Everyone was downstairs or already gone. She was exhausted and overwrought, and her nerves were fried from the longest night of her life.
She forced herself to keep going, certain the suite was up ahead. Shadows pooled in the doorways of unused rooms, and paintings disappeared into blackness. The lights had dimmed now that the party was over. That was all.
But when every hair on her arms lifted, and her stomach dropped, she knew her gut was right, and her logic was wrong. Daisy spun just as a hand shot out from the dark doorway to her left and locked around her throat.
Her scream lodged in her throat, cut off by the crushing grip.
Tannhäuser rushed her backwards, into the wall, his eyes pits of fury, bloodshot and wild, stripped of every veneer of professional composure she’d seen before. “Going somewhere?”
Daisy clawed at his fingers, trying desperately to loosen his unbreakable grip. Tannhäuser wrenched her sideways with such force her feet left the carpet. Her back slammed into another wall, and the air punched from her lungs.
His lip was split and swollen from the hunt. And a purple bruise darkened the hinge of his jaw. His fingers shifted, crushing her jaw, and she gasped for air.
He forced her face upward until her neck strained. “You filthy little slag.” He spat the words into her face. “Did you think I’d let you get away after what you did to me?”
