Back through the split corridor, left where she'd gone right before and through a new hallway. New art she didn't stop to see. A door at the end, heavy wood banded with iron. She threw herself against it with both hands. Locked. Another corridor. Another door. Locked. Another. Locked.
Skarreth’s deep voice reached her from somewhere behind, unhurried, carrying through the marble-floored hallways.
"Octavia."
Just her name. No threat attached. No raised volume. Worse than shouting—a confident calm with no need to rush.
She found a staircase and took it down two steps at a time, her bare feet slapping the stone. Ground floor, finally. A wider hallway with windows—actual windows, the first she'd seen—showing darkness outside, starlight, the suggestion of open ground. She pressed her hands against the glass. Sealed. No latches, no mechanisms.
"Octavia."
Closer now. Still calm.
She followed the wall, searching for a break. There—a door, narrower than the others. The handle turned. Cool air hit her face, and she nearly sobbed with the shock of it. She pushed through into the darkness, and the garden engulfed her. Hedges rose on either side, eight feet tall, walls of dense foliage that swallowed the starlight. A path of pale gravel wound forward, branching, splitting. Of course. Even the outside was a maze.
She chose a direction and ran.
The hedges were beautiful. Even terrified, the artist in her registered their strangeness—not green but deep indigo, leaves that held an iridescent sheen, and flowers. Roses, or flora that wore the shape of roses while being nothing from Earth. Blooms the color of bruised twilight, petals edged in silver that caught what little light filtered through the canopy above.
She brushed against the hedge while turning a corner and gasped.
Pain. Sharp and immediate from a dozen points of fire along her forearm. She jerked back and stared at her skin. Blood welled from thin cuts, slender as paper slices, where the thorns had caught her. The roses had thorns like glass needles, nearly invisible.
She kept going. The gravel path forked. She went right. The hedges pressed closer, narrowing the passage. Thorns caught her clothes, her shoulder, the back of her hand when she pushed a low-hanging branch aside. Each contact left its mark—thin lines of red that beaded and dripped. She was painting a trail with her own body.
She emerged into a small clearing—a dead end, ringed by hedges with a stone bench at its center. She doubled back and chose the other fork. Another dead end. Another. The maze folded in on itself, recursive, patient, built to exhaust.
From somewhere in the dark, his voice carried.
"I can smell your blood, little human."
The words settled over her like frost. This is it, she thought. This is what those rumored whispers of Lord Skarreth were about. This is the hunt. She pressed her bleeding forearm against her stomach.
A howl split the night.
Inhuman. Animal. Hungry.
Octavia ran until her lungs burned. The cuts stung in the night air, dozens of them now—forearms, shoulders, a long scrape across her collarbone where she'd misjudged the width of a passage. The gravel bit into her bare feet. She'd been running for—how long? Minutes? An hour? The same indigo hedges and silver-edged roses repeating in every direction.
The howl came again, closer this time, and ice ran up her spine.
She hit another dead end, and her legs buckled. She went down on one knee in the pale gravel, breathing hard, blood dripping from her fingertips, her shoes abandoned on the ground. Her body shook. Sweat and blood mixed on her skin, stinging every cut. She could keep running. The maze might have an exit. She could crawl if her legs wouldn't hold her, drag herself through the gravel on bleeding hands.
She'd been running her whole life.
From her mother's hospital room at fifteen, where the machines had stopped, and she'd learned what silence really sounded like. From her father's slow retreat into a grief so total it left no room for the daughter still living. From Theron, who'd loved her as well as he knew how, who'd asked her to stay—and she'd chosen the road because the road never asked her to be vulnerable.
She'd run from every warning about the Kael-Voss corridor. Run from the knowledge that she was alone and that she'd built that solitude with her own hands, brick by careful brick.
She'd run from Skarreth's mansion into his maze, and the maze had bled her the same way the running always did—slowly, from a thousand small wounds she accumulated by pushing through instead of stopping.
She stopped.
Octavia planted her palm on the gravel and pushed herself upright. Her legs shook. Her arms dripped. The night air burned in her cuts like salt. She stood in the dead end with the alien roses and the pale gravel spotted with her blood, and she was done.
If this monster wanted her, he could face her properly.
She turned toward the mouth of the clearing—the only way in, the only way out—and lifted her chin. She squared her bleeding shoulders, planted her bare feet, and waited.
