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I make a show of looking around me. “Okay. And what are we doing here?”
“For this first test,youwill not really be doing anything. You will just be the end point. The bait.”
Great. I can certainly be mediocre bait without issue.
“I’ve told the others to wait for me on the others side of the forest,” he continues. “So that they won’t know your exact location. Once I get back to them, the hunt will start. Each of them will try to find you as quickly as possible. So your job for this test is to just stand here until one of them finds you.”
The way he slightly stresses the words ‘just stand here’ makes me frown, but I quickly smoothen my features before he can notice.
“Any questions?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No.”
“Alright then, I’ll see you later.”
Before I can say anything else, he turns around and walks back the way we came.
Narrowing my eyes, I study his retreating back. His shoulders are suddenly a little tense, and he turns his head several times as if nervously checking for something. And he’s walking just a bit too fast.
Uneasiness curls around my spine.
It could just be that he is eager to get back to the rest of our team before they do something stupid on the other side of the forest. But my instincts are telling me something different. Telling me that he is trying to get the hell out of here as fast as he can without alerting me.
And my instincts are very rarely wrong.
I edge two steps back, whipping my head from side to side in order to try to spot whatever it is that’s about to happen here. But there is nothing out of the ordinary. Only grass covered with some twigs and fallen leaves around me, gray clouds in the sky above, a tall rock wall behind, and trees starting in a half circle at the end of the clearing.
But something is wrong. I know it is.
To my left, Jacques clears the tree line and disappears into the forest.
The moment he’s gone, someone else steps out of the woods straight ahead of me.
Rico.
At first, I feel only relief. Because for half a second there, I was worried that Derek and Sebastian had somehow gotten to Jacques and threatened him into leading me here.
But as Rico closes the distance between us, that relief withers and dies like a fragile flower.
Something is different now.
I can feel it in the way he walks. In the way he carries himself. In the way he is looking at me.
A flash of alarm shoots through me, and I instinctively reach for weapons that I don’t even have, because with sudden clarity, I realize thatsomethingis not different now. No.Everythingis different now.
Rico comes to a halt three strides away, his face a cold mask as he looks at me. Merciless power radiates from his muscular body. It’s so intense that I’m half convinced that the fucking grass itself is bending away from him.
I flick a quick assessing glance over his body.
Based on the way the fabric of his t-shirt moves, he has a gun tucked into the back of his belt.
I resist the urge to swallow as I meet his hard stare again.
There is no mistake about it. Rico means business this time. He has thrown aside all sense of restraint and scrapped all other schemes.
He knows who I am, and he knows that I know it.
I know who he is, and he knows that I know that too.
