How long?
The question burns through my skull as I vault over the headless body and sprint deeper into the maze.
How long has Volk been free?
The camera loop was sophisticated. Professional. Not something he could have improvised from inside a cage on Chaff Island. Someone helped him. Someone with access to my security infrastructure, someone who knew the camera protocols well enough to insert a seamless recording without triggering my redundancy alerts.
I mentally calculate the timeline. The glitches started approximately six hours ago. I noticed them, dismissed them, moved on. Six hours is enough time to swim the channel between islands if you're desperate and strong.
Another scream, this one truncated sharply into silence.
I run faster, my lungs burning, my mind racing through the implications. Volk didn't just escape. He planned this. He had inside help. He turned my hunt into his hunt, and now he's loose on an island full of staff and attendants who weren't prepared for a predator.
But none of that matters.
None of it matters because Scarletta is somewhere in this maze with him, and every second I spend calculating is a second he has his hands on her.
I hit the first portal archway and don't hesitate, plunging through into the disorienting darkness that deposits me thirty yards deeper into the labyrinth.
The mud here is churned, disturbed. Fresh drag marks cut through it like wounds.
I follow the trail.
I plunge through the second portal, the disorientation lasting only a heartbeat before my feet hit solid ground. The maze walls blur past as I sprint, my mental map updating in real-time—two turns left, then the center opens up.
Scarletta's screams have changed.
They're wild now. Primal. The kind of sound that comes from somewhere deeper than fear, somewhere that touches madness. Each one drives into my chest like a blade, and I push harder, my legs burning, my lungs on fire.
I round the first turn.
Her screams fracture into something worse—a keening wail that rises and falls, rises and falls, the rhythm of someone watching horror unfold and being unable to stop it.
Second turn.
The bamboo walls fall away and the center platform spreads before me, exactly as I designed it—the circular clearing, the raised platform covered in banana leaves, the ground-level eye bolts for restraints.
Scarletta is on her knees in the mud.
She's covered in blood.
My heart stops. Actually stops. The muscle seizes in my chest and for one infinite second, I am nothing but frozen terror, staring at the red coating her skin, her hair, her face. So much red. Too much red. The color of arterial spray, of opened arteries, of death.
Then my eyes process what they're seeing.
The blood isn't hers.
It's splattered across her in patterns that don't match wounds—cast-off from something else, fromsomeoneelse. The dark-haired attendant lies three feet from her, his throat opened in a ragged smile, his chest still twitching with the last electrical impulses of a dying nervous system.
Volk stands over him, a hunting knife in his hand, and when he sees me, hesmiles.
He spits on Scarletta. A thick glob of phlegm lands in her hair, and she flinches, her wild screams dying into hitching sobs.
Then he looks up and points at the sky, shouting something in Russian.
I hear it now. The distant thrum of rotor blades cutting through air, growing louder.
A helicopter.
