Page 10 of Hunted

“Watch your fucking mouth,” Pearce seethed. “Put the gun away, Sinclair. Target practice is over. Go wash up and get that shoulder taken care of. Deveaux, go with her.”

“Yes, Sir,” Fleur responded, jolting into action.

However, I didn’t move—I still wasn’t sure I wouldn’t follow through on my threat.

I could do it. I could kill the slimy prick before he had a chance to get his hands on me. But I’d undoubtedly just end up dead anyway, courtesy of his father and the rest of the Academy leadership.

It was that realisation of inevitability that finally made my decision for me. I tossed the pistol down onto the table with the other handguns and stalked off the field without another word—without so much as a backwards glance.

Even though I could feel a set of hazel eyes tracking me across the grass.

[ 4 ]

ADDIE

PARAMORE – FAST IN MY CAR

“Well, that was intense,” Fleur muttered in her lilting French accent as we dashed across the pristine, manicured lawn towards the dark, Gothic-style architecture that was Blackwing Academy—and away from the lingering stench of testosterone.

Its limestone walls were the colour of old bones—timeworn, but still sharp as a knife.

“He’s one of Beckett’s merry men. Of course he’s intense,” I huffed back, eyeing the ancient building with a mixture of wariness and dread.

It was beautiful from a distance with its grandiose design, but you could never be sure how many sets of eyes were trained on you at any given point. Every window housed an opportunity for surveillance. Every darkened alcove and every sombre shrub could be watching. Even the trees on the mountain peaks kept no secrets.

Everything had eyes. Blackwing was always watching.

The instructors knew everything—or had ways to find out. So, it was only a matter of time before Instructor Pearce—and therefore, Instructors Beckett, Lockwood, and probably Commander Varco—learned all about my altercation with Sebastos along the zipline.

And probably only a matter of time until I was inevitably punished for it.

It wasn’t until we got closer—until the tall, stone building pressed down upon us—that a shiver skated down my spine and I finally realised how its elegance was really just a veneer stretched over something darker and colder.

Something inherently more dangerous.

Blackwing Academy was the kind of beautiful that made your stomach drop, not the kind that gave you the warm fuzzies. And as if the storm that plagued us for the majority of our assessment heard my disparaging mental description of Assassin Academy, as it was more commonly called, the clouds thundered and the skies opened, drenching us anew.

Fleur and I hurried up two sets of rain-slickened garden steps and past the grotesque statues of twisted creatures scattered around the base of the buildings. We halfheartedly tried to beat the next downpour by jogging towards the Academy’s dull stained-glass windows, but only succeeded in skidding into a cohort of first years as we rounded a blind corner.

“Watch where you’re going!” Fleur shouted, scattering them like a flock of pigeons.

“Sorry, Deveaux,” a blank-faced male muttered. I had no intention of committing his features to memory. What was the point when he’d only end up dead—sooner rather than later?

We didn’t speak again until we were back in our dorm room, after dodging a handful of other recruits and staff members—and their keenly trained ears. The winding hallways and darkened stairwells took much longer to navigate than when we were under threat of punishment from Beckett this morning. And not the good kind of punishment; the kind where we’d have had to run a marathon as a warm-up or something. So, by the time Fleur and I reached our cohort’s designated quarters, she was bursting at the seams with questions.

Fleur Deveaux had been my closest friend for a little over a year. When I first arrived—after being told my life was forfeit if I tried to escape—I hadn’t wanted to get close to any of the other recruits. They were all dropping like flies, and I was loath to get attached to someone who would just die a day, a week, or a month later.

But Fleur was determined. Apparently, she’d inherited more than a little of her mother’s backbone, and just a touch of her father’s well-placed charisma. She had grown up in the spotlight, as the daughter of a financial advisor and a French bureaucrat. Antoine and Nadine were influential in all of society’s inner circles. And while Antoine told rich people how to spend their money, it was Nadine who ultimately profited. She was the CEO of some huge biotech company that all of Antoine’s clients invested in, and therefore had her finger in a lot of other political pies—including the running of the Academy, according to Fleur.

Nadine hated that her daughter and I were so close. Me, from my almost-homeless background, with no family to speak of and no monetary worth to my name—and her daughter, the heiress of her own company, currently worth a few billion.

But Fleur was incredibly stubborn when she’d made her mind up about something, and so far, Nadine hadn’t pushed the issue. Maybe because she knew that Fleur was exactly like her in that regard. Maybe because she knew that, when push came to shove, I had her daughter’s back. Despite the fact that my friend was only here because her parents had enrolled her themselves—a foolish endeavour to harden her, to smother her wily ways, not realising she was steel-forged already—Nadine didn’t want her only daughter dead.

And we all knew how easily that could happen at Blackwing.

“So. Do you want to tell me what that was all about, or do you want me to guess?” she prodded, waggling her eyebrows and flicking her golden ponytail over one shoulder, sashaying over to my allocated bunk.

I pursed my lips, not sure if she was referring to Varco or Pearce. Waiting until we reached my cot nestled in the far corner of the room, I decided to answer with the former, mindful of the ears that surrounded us.