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“What the fuck,” I breathe.
I kneel to inspect the door but can’t see much. The handle must have been destroyed from the outside—I can’t even unlock it.
I stand and change, dressing quickly in comfortable black trousers, black undertop, and a thick jacket. The hunt might not start until midday, but it looks like Willow’s made liberal use of the term “head start”. I suppose she could argue the contract didn’t stipulate anything aboutpreparingfor the hunt. I can’t begrudge her.
After all, she did promise to make this hunt fun for me.
Sliding open the window, I step out onto the balcony. My bedroom is on the first floor—the drop to the ground floor isn’t high, but if I land wrong, I could injure an ankle. Of course, Willow is already injured—that doesn’t seem to be stopping her. If she were in my situation, she would jump.
Fuck it. I climb over the railing and drop, bending my knees to absorb the shock. The landing is jarring, and I take a moment to check my legs. No pain in my knees or ankles. So far so good.
I make my way back into the house, heading straight for my office. I have enough cameras set up throughout the house and grounds that I should be able to pinpoint Willow’s location or at least find out the direction she went in. I don’t even need to check her room to know she’s already gone.
When I get to my office, though, I find the door handle on the floor. By the look of the metal, it’s been roughly smashed off. The door is mag-locked, of course, but without access to the handle, there’s no way I can unlock it. A flicker of annoyance makes the muscles in my neck twitch.
I pull my phone out of my pocket. I could probably get someone in to fix the locks within the next couple of hours—I have plenty of time. But my phone is unresponsive, nothing loads. Checking the connections quickly tells me the internet is disconnected.
Making my way back to the living space, I head for the router to find it also smashed to smithereens. A shiver crawls through me, half-annoyance, half-excitement. Without access to my surveillance system or my phone, this is going to be a real hunt.
Time to be a real hunter.
The dogs confirm thatWillow is no longer in the house, so I head outside. I briefly debate taking them with me but decide against it. I wouldn’t put it past Willow to hurt Cerberus, and I cannot tolerate that idea.
Luckily, the combination of frosty grass and Willow’s heavy boots makes it easy to track her away from the house and through the grounds. I lose her tracks briefly around the tennis courts and archery field but pick them back up heading towards the winding path into the woodland.
In the woods, the ground becomes harder to read. The fallen leaves and moss make the ground more porous, twigs and branches and acorns obscuring the grass. The underbrush is thick, and there are enough evergreens in the forest that the canopy blocks out most of the growing daylight.
I proceed slowly but methodically through the woodland using a map divided into quadrants. I check off the quadrants as I go, proceeding quickly.
Not long after midday, I pick up her track again when I find a cigarette butt next to a tree trunk. I pick it up with my gloved fingers. There’s a smudge of lipstick around the filters, and the cigarette is stone-cold. Definitely hers—definitely not recent, which tells me she must have come this way, but a while ago.
Next time, I’ll have a tracker on her, and I’ll make personally sure she can’t sabotage the hunt before it starts.
At three, the sky begins to darken, and a low rumble of thunder growls on the horizon. The frost has long melted from the ground, but the heavy wall of clouds gathering low on the horizon tells me it’s not snow I need to worry about.
I start circling back in the direction of the house. If nothing else, the rain will force Willow out of the woods.
By the time I leave the cover of the trees, night has fallen, and ice-cold rain is slashing down from the sky, so thickly I don’t even spot the house until I see squares of blurry light. Willow is nowhere to be seen.
I try to wait her out as long as possible. Surely, the wisest thing for her to do is make a run for the house, end the hunt before therain gets worse. She might suspect that I’m waiting, but she can’t know for sure. Surely, she’ll take the risk.
Except that the minutes go by and the storm rages louder and Willow doesn’t appear. I draw closer to the house and spot the dogs on the other side of the window, sitting patiently, watching me, waiting.
Willow, it would seem, isn’t going to let the risk of pneumonia get in the way of her prize money. She probably thinks a violent cold or a butchered leg will be worth the ten thousand pounds she’ll earn. I can’t complain—after all, I offered her the money specifically so she would make the hunts more of a challenge to me.
My mistake was only in underestimating her respect for the rules. No fencer would ever flaunt rules—they’re there for a reason, they set the parameters of the match. But Willow doesn’t care for parameters, or honour, or elegance. Expecting better from her is like trying to play a chess match with a savage. She looked at the board, knew she didn’t stand a chance, and swept away the pieces.
I underestimated Willow; in return, she destroyed my game and robbed me of any satisfaction.
My mistake, but not one I’ll be repeating.
Almost ten minutes afterI’ve gone back inside, while I’m standing by the fireplace with a towel around my neck, Willow comes stumbling in through the french windows. She’s in black jeans, a black turtleneck top, and her leather jacket—all of them are soaked all the way through. Her hair is dangling in loose strands around her face, where her mascara is smearedin pathetic streaks down her cheeks. She looks a mess, but she’s grinning from ear to ear.
“Knew you’d be here,” she says as she pushes past me into the house. “Ten grand, huh?”
I clench my jaw but refuse to give her any sign of irritation on my part.
“Ten grand,” I tell her. “From that, I will of course be deducting the cost of repairing all the damage you caused to my property.”
