But… it's a trickle and the blood underneath me is… a puddle.
Slowly, I turn my head.
And I scream…
Because on the ground, in his own puddle of blood, is the face of the blonde attendant, blue eyes open, his body… no where to be found.
I scream—a raw, throat-tearing sound that echoes through the maze—and in the exact same heartbeat, I register movement behind me. Too close. Too fast.
Before I can even think to scramble away, thick fingers tangle violently in my hair, yanking hard enough that white spots burst across my vision. The pain is instant and electric, radiating from my scalp down my spine.
Then I'm being dragged.
I'm hauled backward like a sack, my heels scraping uselessly against the earth as whoever has me pulls me down the narrow path. My fingers claw at the ground, trying to find purchase, trying to stop this, but there's nothing to grab onto except slick mud and the rough edge of bamboo that tears at my palms.
"This isn't how it happens!" I scream, my voice cracking with hysteria. The words tear out of me, desperate, pleading. "This isn't how it goes!Red!" I shriek it like a prayer, like an incantation that might somehow undo whatever nightmare I've stumbled into. "Red, red, red!"
My captor's response is immediate and brutal—a bare foot slams into my ribs, knocking the air from my lungs in a painful whoosh. The impact sends me rolling sideways into the mud, and for a second all I can do is gasp like a fish on land, trying to remember how to breathe.
When I finally manage to drag my eyes upward, squinting through the pain and the film of tears blurring my vision, I see him properly for the first time.
And he'swrong.
This man—this person looming over me with one mud-caked foot still raised—is someone I have never seen before.
Not one of the three masked attendants I was expecting. Not anyone from Caleb's carefully constructed fantasy.
He's older, maybe in his fifties, with a weathered face that speaks of years lived hard. His skin is smeared with thick mud that's dried in patches, flaking off in places to reveal pale flesh underneath. But it's not just mud covering him. There's something else—something dark and sticky coating his arms, his chest, glistening wetly in the dappled light filtering through the bamboo.
"Who... who thefuckare you?" The words tear out of me in a ragged scream that doesn't even sound like my own voice anymore.
His face is caked in so much filth I can barely make out his features—just those pale blue eyes blazing out from beneath the grime, utterly devoid of anything human. Cold. Predatory.Evil.
When he speaks, it comes out as a guttural growl, harsh syllables that scrape against my ears like broken glass. I don't understand a single word, but the cadence, the harsh consonants—they sound suspiciously like... Russian?
My brain short-circuits trying to process this. Russian.Russian. What the actual fuck is happening? This wasn't part of the script. This wasn't part of any of it.
"Red!" I scream again, my voice pitching higher. "Red, red,red!"
Chapter 15
Caleb
Istrip off my shirt, tossing it onto the chair beside the console. My pants follow. I'm already half-hard thinking about what comes next—Scarletta navigating the maze blindfolded, my voice in her ear, the hunt playing out exactly as she wrote it.
Three months of planning. Every bamboo wall measured to match her manuscript. Every portal archway calibrated to disorient her in precisely the ways she described. The monster costumes cost forty thousand dollars each, custom-fabricated prosthetics that would make Hollywood jealous.
My boxer briefs come off, my hand going to my cock automatically.
How I will fuck this girl today.
What she got from me so far… it's nothing compared to how I'll take her in the center of the maze. I picture her on her knees, my cock buried in her mouth, The tip pressing against the back of her throat?—
A scream cuts through the monitors.
I turn, frowning. She's barely started. The first capture isn't supposed to happen for another eight minutes minimum, andeven then, the attendants know to build the tension slowly, to let her hear them before they touch her.
This scream is wrong—pitched too high, ragged with genuine terror rather than the delicious fear we've been cultivating all day.
