I consent to be marked.
I consent to be owned.
A knot of fear formed in my stomach.
It didn’t make sense. Iwantedto be here. I’d risked things to be here, not the least of which was my relationship with Bram, who was going to absolutely lose his shit when he found out.
And he would find out.
Still, seeing the consent sign buzzing on the wall made it all real. I was really going to agree to the Hunt. I was going to be chased and maybe caught and…
Well, I could hardly imagine what would come next.
But if I won, all the risks would be worth it.
My gaze was drawn to movement on the other side of the room, the masked men parting like the Red Sea as one of the men wearing the bird mask — a falcon or hawk straight from a nightmare — stepped forward.
I sucked in a breath involuntarily. He was as big as a mountain, his face covered by the silver hawk mask, its metal feathers rising to points that fanned out over the top of his head. The mask’s eyeholes were narrow over a pointed beak that looked sharp enough to draw blood.
A primal need to escape burst through my chest, the instinct to run overwhelming, and I had to resist the urge to look back at the door, to make use of it by getting the hell out of here.
I’d regret it later, would regret not taking advantage of the fact that Bram had taken Maeve to Bali with Poe and Remy, that no one could call my brother and tell him his little sister was about to join the Hunt, one of Blackwell Falls’ many dirty little secrets.
The door opened and Titus walked into the room, glanced at me with consternation, and crossed the room to stand next to the biggest of the men in the hawk masks.
The masked man picked up a clipboard sitting on the folding table next to him and stepped toward us.
I took a step back without thinking.
“Welcome to the Hunt.” The hawk’s voice was low and gravelly, as cold as the trails at the top of the mountain in the dead of winter. His brown eyes glittered behind his mask and his black hair was long enough that it skimmed his hulking shoulders. Ink covered every inch of his arms and torso, a wall-to-wall mural I couldn’t make out in the dim light of the room. “Let’s go over the rules. Well, let’s go overyourrules. We have no rules. That’s something you should know from the jump. We do what we want in there.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” one of the blondes said. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie, her feet clad in big black boots, and I looked at my sneakers, wondering if I’d made a mistake opting for speed instead of protection.
His eyes flashed. “It’s not. You’re prey. If we catch you, we do what we want with you. The end.” He paused, like he was waiting for someone to object, then continued when no one did. We all knew what we were getting into. “The Hunt lasts twenty-four hours. If you’re caught, you’ll be marked, and for the next ninetydays, you belong to the team who claims you with their collar. That team may or may not exit the Hunt with you at that time.”
“But… if we’re caught, isn’t the Hunt over?” the brunette next to me asked.
The man in the hawk mask laughed, a maniacal thread of darkness that wound its way through the room like acrid smoke. “It’s over when we say it’s over. The team who claims you can leave the tunnels with you at that point, after which you become their property for ninety days, submitting to any and all demands. But they can also keep you in the tunnels for the full twenty-four hours.”
Silence settled over the girls around me as we all thought about what that meant, what might happen to us underground once we were caught.
“The holding room is a safe zone. You can come here for water or first aid at any time. You won’t be hunted, but if you’re still here when the clock runs out, you automatically lose and become the property of whichever team claims you first.” He paused. “If you manage to stay unmarked during the entire twenty-four-hour period, you win, meaning you can demand a specific kind of favor from the team that hunted you.”
We all knew what the favor was: it was why we were all here. But it was also dangerous — and criminal — to say it out loud, for the men who would do the favor and the women who would be asking for it.
“How do we know who hunted us if we make it to the end without being marked?” the second blonde asked.
“You don’t,” he said. “But we do.”
I glanced back at the other men, all of them staring at us like sharks eying fresh chum in the water. The other two men in hawk masks stood at the front, their hair hidden by their masks, making them seem even more like faceless animals. They werejust as muscular, just as covered in ink as the guy standing in front of us.
The men leaned in to speak to each other, their voices a murmuring, indecipherable echo in the underground room, their eyes sliding over us like dessert at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
They weren’t just sizing us up. They werechoosing.
And now I realized something else: there weren’t enough of us to go around. Twenty-one men in teams of three and five women meant there would be a scramble to claim us early, a handful of mice in a cage teeming with snakes.
My pulse raced at the thought.