Total pages in book: 164
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 156728 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 784(@200wpm)___ 627(@250wpm)___ 522(@300wpm)
She could safe word. She could find the locket and say the magic words, and this nightmare would end. So what if she lost the money? She’d already lost pieces of herself she’d never get back.
Daisy staggered forward, letting gravity edge her along. She wobbled from one side of the path to the other in a serpentine pattern drawn of weariness more than any sort of strategy. Her brain hurt from thinking.
Rubbing her scalp, she winced. When she pulled her hand away, her fingers were dark and wet, glistening under the moonlight with her blood.
When voices approached, she hid in the gardens. Sharp leaves sliced at her arms and face like tiny knives, but she was beyond flinching.
Blood welled from a cut on her cheek, warm and immediate, and she wiped it away. Her feet left dark smears on the pale stone path, but that would only make it easier to find her way back.
She was deep in the belly of a maze, alone and bleeding, utterly lost, when a twig snapped behind her. Daisy stilled.
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” a man called out through the boxwoods. “End of the line, little one.”
Suddenly, another tribute burst through the hedgerow like a deer in flight. Her dark hair and wild eyes said everything that needed to be said. When she ran, Daisy ran.
The hunter continued to call out taunts. Daisy bolted into a crossing, where beanstalks curved into arbors and vines twisted wildly about large pieces of abstract art.
They hid in the shadow of an enormous sculpture of a harp. The dark-haired woman, younger than Daisy with raccoon eyes from where her makeup had smeared, wore a ruby red gown that had torn at the shoulder.
As Daisy stared at the tribute, she mirrored her stunned expression. What a pair. The lace edge of their bras showed with every deep breath, and they had enough leaves and twigs in their hair to start a forest fire. Her chest heaved with the same desperate rhythm as Daisy’s.
They stared at each other.
No words. Understanding passed between them that went beyond language.
The hunter called out again, the same taunting rhyme, “Fee-fi-fo-fumb, I smell a feisty one.”
The girl’s chin trembled. Tears cut tracks through the dirt on her cheeks.
Maybe they could fight him off together. Maybe that’s what Daisy needed all along—an alliance.
Taking pity on the tribute, she reached out and grabbed her hand. But the tribute jerked her hand back as if Daisy had burned her. She looked at her the way Daisy looked at the hunters.
“It’s okay. I want to help you,” she whispered.
The tribute’s gaze dropped to Daisy’s blood-stained dress. “You’ll only get me caught.” Then she was gone, rushing off into the night and leaving Daisy all alone.
She deserved that.
Trust no one.
She couldn’t hold it against the girl for only doing what Daisy had done all along.
She waited behind the harp a while longer, but when her eyes got tired, she forced herself to move. The necklace couldn’t be far—
Hadrian Welles stepped out from the hedges with a smile that promised nothing quick, nothing kind, nothing merciful.
“Where were we?” He walked slowly, cracking his knuckles with each deliberate step.
Daisy staggered back, her shoulders pressing against the hedge wall. The branches prickled through the beaded silk of her gown, a thousand tiny warnings she had no way to heed.
Trapped.
“I remember—right here.”
Breath exploded in her lungs as his fist connected with her stomach before she registered the movement. The world folded inward, collapsing to a single point of white-hot compression beneath her ribs where sight and sound only whistled.
Her knees buckled. Gravel bit into her palms as she crumpled, mouth gaping like a landed fish, diaphragm seizing against a vacuum as she fell to her back and mouthed timber.
Copper flooded her tongue. The night sky wheeled overhead, stars smearing into streaks, as the mist turned to rain. Somewhere far away, a bell tolled. The wet rasp of her throat opened as she swallowed, forgetting how to breathe. Curling to her side like an animal curls around its wounds.
“Get up.”
Timber.
He kicked her side. “I said, get up!”
Her eyes welled, and her vision blurred. When he ordered her to stand a third time, and she didn’t move, he yanked her up by the arm.
Her legs tangled beneath her, and she spun, twisting her dead weight helplessly as he dragged her to her feet. “Stand up, you fucking slut.”
“Timber,” Daisy wheezed, falling back to her knees as he dragged her over the pebbled ground.
Her fingers wouldn’t cooperate. They were shaking violently.
“Timber. Timber. Timber.” Her voice was paralyzed with fear, her silent pleas lost on the breeze.
He dragged her to a lawn, the cold, damp grass forming a slick carpet beneath her back as he pulled her like a caveman towards a large stone.
“You had to run, didn’t you?”
He threw her over the flat surface of the boulder, knocking the wind out of her once more.