Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
When I finally manage to drag my eyes upward, squinting through the pain and the film of tears blurring my vision, I see him properly for the first time.
And he's wrong.
This man—this person looming over me with one mud-caked foot still raised—is someone I have never seen before.
Not one of the three masked attendants I was expecting. Not anyone from Caleb's carefully constructed fantasy.
He's older, maybe in his fifties, with a weathered face that speaks of years lived hard. His skin is smeared with thick mud that's dried in patches, flaking off in places to reveal pale flesh underneath. But it's not just mud covering him. There's something else—something dark and sticky coating his arms, his chest, glistening wetly in the dappled light filtering through the bamboo.
"Who... who the fuck are you?" The words tear out of me in a ragged scream that doesn't even sound like my own voice anymore.
His face is caked in so much filth I can barely make out his features—just those pale blue eyes blazing out from beneath the grime, utterly devoid of anything human. Cold. Predatory. Evil.
When he speaks, it comes out as a guttural growl, harsh syllables that scrape against my ears like broken glass. I don't understand a single word, but the cadence, the harsh consonants—they sound suspiciously like... Russian?
My brain short-circuits trying to process this. Russian. Russian. What the actual fuck is happening? This wasn't part of the script. This wasn't part of any of it.
"Red!" I scream again, my voice pitching higher. "Red, red, red!"
Chapter 15
Caleb
Istrip off my shirt, tossing it onto the chair beside the console. My pants follow. I'm already half-hard thinking about what comes next—Scarletta navigating the maze blindfolded, my voice in her ear, the hunt playing out exactly as she wrote it.
Three months of planning. Every bamboo wall measured to match her manuscript. Every portal archway calibrated to disorient her in precisely the ways she described. The monster costumes cost forty thousand dollars each, custom-fabricated prosthetics that would make Hollywood jealous.
My boxer briefs come off, my hand going to my cock automatically.
How I will fuck this girl today.
What she got from me so far… it's nothing compared to how I'll take her in the center of the maze. I picture her on her knees, my cock buried in her mouth, The tip pressing against the back of her throat—
A scream cuts through the monitors.
I turn, frowning. She's barely started. The first capture isn't supposed to happen for another eight minutes minimum, and even then, the attendants know to build the tension slowly, to let her hear them before they touch her.
This scream is wrong—pitched too high, ragged with genuine terror rather than the delicious fear we've been cultivating all day.
My eyes find her feed, and my brain simply stops.
The image doesn't make sense.
I stare at it, waiting for the visual to resolve into something rational, something that fits within the parameters of what should be happening on my island.
There's a man in the maze.
A man who is not one of my attendants.
The build is wrong, the posture is wrong, everything is wrong. He's covered in mud, caked with it, and he's dragging Scarletta by her hair through the dirt while she screams.
"Red! Red!"
Her voice tears through the speakers, and the word hits me like a physical blow. She's safewording. She's actually safewording, and the man—whoever the fuck he is—doesn't stop.
He kicks her. He kicks her in the ribs and she crumples, and I watch her mouth form the word again, desperate, pleading.
Time dilates into something thick and syrupy.
The cameras. The glitches I dismissed. The digital artifacts and blur on the Chaff Island feeds that I attributed to humidity and scheduled for maintenance.
My head snaps to the secondary wall of monitors. Volk's feed. The body is still there, face-down in the mud, covered in fire ants exactly as it should be.
Except.
The body hasn't moved in hours. Not a twitch. Not a single involuntary spasm from the venom coursing through his system. I'd noticed it earlier and assumed he was dead or dying, but now—
I zoom in on the Chaff Island feed, and the image stutters. Pixelates. Reforms.
The resolution is wrong. The shadows don't match the current position of the sun. The timestamp in the corner reads correctly, but the light filtering through the jungle canopy is at least two hours off from where it should be.
Loop.
Someone looped my fucking cameras.
My gaze returns to the maze feed, to the mud-covered man with pale eyes who has my Scarletta by the throat now, and the pieces click together with the precision of a closing trap.
Dimitri Volkov isn't dead in the jungle.
Dimitri Volkov is in my maze.
Time snaps back into focus.
I'm moving before my conscious mind finishes processing. The control room door crashes open and I'm sprinting through the jungle, my bare feet hitting roots and rocks and I don't feel any of it. The undergrowth tears at my legs. I'm naked. I'm fucking naked and unarmed and Scarletta is in there with a man who has spent fifteen years trafficking children, a man who knows exactly what happens to people who cross me, a man with nothing left to lose.