But she’s not panicking and that’s what catches me.
She pauses at a junction where three corridors meet, head tilting as she listens. Her breathing’s controlled. I can see it in the rise and fall of her shoulders, the way she keeps her mouth shut and pulls air through her nose. No gasping. No sobbing. Just calculation.
She’s learning.
I’ve seen it happen before, but not this fast. Most runners spend the first hour in pure reaction—fight or flight, adrenaline drowning out thought. By the time they start thinking strategically, they’re already caught.
She started thinking ten minutes in.
I tracked her through the bookstore earlier, watched her use sound as a weapon, tossing that hardback to draw attention while she slipped out the back. Efficient. Clean. No wasted movement.
Now, she’s doing it again.
She scans left, then right, then up, not looking for an exit but looking forangles. Where the sightlines break. Where sound carries wrong. Where someone might be waiting.
Her gaze sweeps past me.
I don’t move.
And she doesn’t see me. The catwalk’s too high, the shadows too thick. But she knows someone’s there. I can see it in the way her shoulders tighten, the way her weight shifts onto the balls of her feet.
This is the part I didn’t plan for. I should be managing the whole board right now—tracking groups, adjusting territories, making sure the idiots in the president masks don’t fuck up the flow. The Hunt runs smooth when everyone stays in their lane, when competition sharpens instead of collapsing into chaos.
Instead, I’m fixated on one runner. One injured, bleeding, too-smart-for-her-own-good runner who should’ve been caught an hour ago.
I tap once against the railing. Low. Controlled. The vibration travels through metal and concrete, a pulse that doesn’t carry sound butpressure. Rogue will feel it before he hears it. That’s his thing. Always has been.
A beat passes. Then another.
The answer comes, not a tap but a shift. A shadow moves where it shouldn’t, three corridors over, just visible through a gap in the collapsed ceiling tiles. Rogue, repositioning without announcement. He’s closer to her than I am now. Closer than she knows.
Good.
I track the other groups next, scanning the levels below and the corridors that feed into this section. The bone-mask pair is sweeping the west wing, methodical but slow. They won’t be a problem. Another trio of Runts wearing animal masks are licking their wounds near the loading docks after running into Sting earlier. Also not a problem.
But there’s another group.
Four of them, moving fast from the east. No masks I recognize. Opportunists, probably. The kind who show up to Hunts, thinking numbers and noise will carry them through.
They’re angling toward her.
Like hell.
I watch their path, calculate the intersection point. Thirty seconds, maybe forty, before they cross into her corridor. She won’t see them coming, not with the way the space bends, not with the way sound dies in that stretch.
My hand tightens on the railing.
They’ll box her in. She’s injured, tired, running out of clean moves. Even if she fights, even if she uses that piece of metal she’s been carrying like a weapon, four on one doesn’t end well.
And I don’t want her caught by them.
The thought lands before I can stop it, sharp and unwelcome.
Claim.Not protection. Not fairness.Claim.
She’s already marked. The lipstick in the sign-up room, the way she looked straight at the glass like she knew we were watching, that wasn’t bravado. That was acknowledgment. She walked into this place knowing exactly what she was signing up for, and she didn’t flinch.
That makes her ours. The possessive thought irritates me more than it should. I don’t need this. I don’t need a runner who makes me recalibrate, who pulls my attention away from the board, who makes me think in terms ofkeepinginstead ofcatching.
