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I assessed my surroundings, finding myself ensconced in dappled darkness, surrounded entirely by trees. The road we’d driven in on was a dirt one. The air smelled of cooling earth and still warm wood with an undercurrent of something unpleasant, like sour mulch…or decomposing corpses.
“Untie her,” someone said, but when the bear, Tiny, stepped forward, I loosened my hands, showing him the empty one. No need to let them know I was armed yet.
“Hmm,” someone grunted, a sound of surprised approval I thought might’ve come from Diesel.
“What is this?” I asked, folding the blade in my hand so it laid flat against my wrist, hidden from view, but easy to throw in a hurry if I needed to.
“Escape or stay alive until dawn and you will have passed the trial,” the snake said in a voice I didn’t recognize.
“That’s it? There aren’t any rules?”
The bear and the wolf shared a look, but no one replied, and I understood they didn’t expect me to last very long.
“You have a one-minute head start,” Diesel said, his voice ringing true even through the crow mask he wore. I hated that it looked similar to the ones Becca had custom made for the guys. “Don’t waste it.”
“Fifty-nine,” the snake said excitedly, limbering up his legs for a chase. “Fifty-eight.”
“Fifty-seven,” the stag joined the countdown, adjusting his hold on his crossbow.
I sent one last look Diesel’s way, letting him see that I would not go fucking quietly, before I bent, tearing the bottom of my dress away and kicking off my heels. And then I was running. Drawing on the part of myself that I would need to survive. My darkness bloomed to life, spurred to wake by the adrenaline pumping through my veins. Making my vision clearer. Senses sharper.
It was the darkness that whispered sweet nothings in my ear when a sharp rock cut deep into the fleshy underside of my left foot. And when a tree branch whipped across my face, leaving a potent sting in my right eye that forced it closed.
Speed was key here.
Escape was the goal. I had no doubt they would find me if I tried to hide.
But first I needed to outrun the distance their crossbow bolts could travel, and then I needed to find my way out of these woods, onto a road, to somewhere there were houses I could break into or cars I could hotwire.
If there were no rules that meant I could use any means to escape. I just needed to find thosemeans, and right now it looked like all there was for miles as far as I could see were trees and darkness.
Twenty-two, twenty-one, twenty…
The countdown continued in my head, and I veered right on a whim. They would expect me to run straight forward, to put as much distance between me and them in sixty seconds as possible. They may not have expected a deviation.
Four, three, two…
The rest of the countdown finished out in my head, and a renewed burst of energy seared like white hot lightning down the length of my body, propelling me faster until I was sailing over the uneven earth, launching over fallen forest debris and dodging low hanging branches like it was my fucking job.
Just stay ahead of them.If they can’t catch up to you, they can’t shoot you.
It had to be a scare tactic. The guys had made it clear they cared what happened to me, which I was still processing, so the Saints wouldn’t…they wouldn’t actually shoot me, right? At least, not kill shots? Maybe that was why they were using crossbows. I liked my chances against a crossbow versus a gun a lot better.
An arrowthunkedinto the tree directly beside my head, and I hit the ground with a gasp, my eyes widening.
Wrong.
I was so wrong.
I was also up and running again, distantly hearing the brush of booted feet over the ground behind me. Someone shouting far off to my left. Someone else shouting back, also far in the distance.
Whoever was on my tail, though, they were closing in.
Was it wishful thinking to hope it was only one? That the others spread off into five other directions?
Gritting my teeth, I kept running, and the next low hanging branch I found, I grabbed hold of instead of sliding beneath, pulling myself up to the next branch and the next. Until I was at least fifteen feet from the ground and would be absolutely fucked if there were more than a few of them following me.
Or at a very good advantage if it were just one.
