Page 41 of Hunted

“By channelling trauma through weight sessions, I guess.”

“No—not that—although that was fucking impressive. How did you avoid collapsing like the rest of us?” His deep brown eyes flitted over my face, apparently searching for the deception he so obviously believed me guilty of.

Scowling, I answered, “I ripped my comms out the second we were all in the same room. No one else did. And right before you fell, your hand was halfway up to⁠—”

“My ear,” he breathed, eyes going wide. “You’re right. Just before I fell, I heard a sharp, high-pitched tone—like the comms had bad feedback.” He shuddered at the recollection. “Fuck.”

“Mmm. We’re gonna need them in the next round too. Plus, my period ended a few days ago”—his face scrunched in disgust, while mine twisted in the lingering memory of horrific, foetal-position, nine-out-of-ten pain—“and I always feel stronger when that shit is over.”

Mercy nodded enthusiastically. “Girl, same⁠—”

The sound of gunfire interrupted her, the sentence dying on the tip of her tongue. Seb’s team had begun—and hopefully Evander or Beckett could make that asshole hurt before I got my hands on him in the next round.

I followed Eth over to a set of smaller screens on this side of the compound, ignoring the glares of the tech squad assigned to monitor them. Two screens—each divided into four grids of separate video feeds—flickered as Seb’s team moved through the compound.

It was impossible to tell whose feed was whose, at least until one of his teammates looked directly at him, showing me that he was at the junction of the first hallway. I was then able to narrow down which feed was Seb’s based on what he should have been seeing at that point in the first task.

He gestured for five of his team to go left—the same way I’d gone—leaving himself and two others to go right. Eric looked about ready to shit his own pants when Sebastos sent him around the corner first. Even more so when his body flew backwards as a round hit him squarely in the chest.

Sebastos shot the perpetrator down, stepped over his friend’s body, and fucking strolled up to the end of the hallway like he knew exactly where the instructors were and had no qualms about them shooting him when he got there.

My eyes narrowed, watching the scene unfold from his perspective.

With a gun barely drawn, casually pointed down at a forty-five-degree angle, Sebastos turned the handle of the study I knew Beckett was in and peered around the doorframe.

Evander greeted him with the barrel of a handgun, poised to shoot—but hesitated.

“Why the fuck—” Eth began.

The exterior doors slammed open, and everyone in the back end of the compound whirled at the intrusion. Sharp, precise footsteps click-clacked in—dress shoes covering the toes of none other than Commander Varco. With zero hesitation, he strode over to the same screens Eth and I had been staring at and cleared his throat pointedly at us still standing there.

We backstepped, falling into those blank stares and taut postures drilled into us from day one.

Commander Varco tutted, stepping up into my space, tainting the air with the smell of mint, leather, and cigarette smoke. “Blackwing does not take kindly to cheats.”

I bristled at the insinuation.

“So, unless you’d like to find yourselves at the bottom of the leaderboard come Graduation, I suggest you step away from these screens.”

“Yes, Sir,” Ethan barked, immediately gripping my upper arm and hauling me away.

“We weren’t cheating,” I grumbled, wrenching my arm free from his tight grip.

“I know, but I’m not about to give him an excuse to penalise either one of us.” His eyes dug into mine. “We have too much on the line here, Ads.”

He ran a hand roughly through his thick, black hair, mussing up the short strands in a way that tugged painfully on my heartstrings. Fleur had always smoothed them back down for him—calmed him with one kind gesture.

My fingers twitched, wanting to offer the same reprieve yet unable to make myself do so.

I didn’t want to take her place. Not even in something as simple as a small kindness. But I simultaneously hated that he was as torn up as I was, and yet neither could share, much less aid the other. My inner turmoil gave him time to recompose himself, and when he turned back around, it was with that same blank face in situ.

“Red team!” he called, daring a quick smirk my way. Whispering behind a cupped hand, he added, “I wanted so badly to say assemble.”

I snorted at the reference—one I was actually familiar with considering the franchise had been plastered over every billboard in every city, every time a new movie was coming out.

“We need a game plan. Varco’s team will be coming in hot, judging by their tactics in this first part of the assessment,” Ethan told them. “Sebastos gives no fucks as to how many of his team falls, so long as he gets what he needs by the end.”

Bodie snarled, but even he couldn’t disagree.