by Hart, Stella
My eyes started to focus again, and I let out a deep breath as Elias rolled off me and onto his back. A moment later, he propped himself up on one elbow and looked over at me, his forehead creased with thought.
“I wasn’t just saying all that shit earlier to try and get laid,” he murmured. “I do love you. You know that now, right?”
“Yes. And I—”
The words were on the tip of my tongue, but even with the new level of honesty and intimacy we’d just reached, I couldn’t say them. “Elias,” I began again, hot shame creeping into my cheeks. “I know I feel the same way as you. I really do. But I just… I can’t say it yet.”
I thought he would look hurt or vulnerable. Instead he smiled faintly and moved closer. He put an arm around me, dragging me into the warmth of his embrace. “I know. I don’t expect you to after what you’ve been put through lately.”
“I’m sorry.” I felt like a miserable bitch. Why couldn’t I just say it? He did.
He squeezed me tighter. “Don’t be. I get it. You won’t be able to say it until you’re really safe. Her too. Or him.” He put his hand on my stomach, acknowledging what had previously remained unspoken. The five-week-old life growing deep inside me; that tiny ball of cells which terrified and excited me all at the same time.
“Yeah. I think that’s it,” I whispered, looking over at the barred window.
I knew exactly how strong my feelings for Elias were. My life was braided with his, inseparable, now and forever. But in this moment, when I was still staring down the barrel of imminent death, it was impossible to open up all the way. Impossible to let go and love him as purely and honestly as I could if I were free.
He knew and understood all that, and it only made me love him more.
“Will you let me help you now?” he said softly, stroking my hair.
I swallowed hard and snuggled into him. “God, yes,” I murmured. “Get me the hell out of here.”
6
Elias
2 days later
The gong sounded, ringing loudly in my ears, and the hunt began.
“Go, Tatum! Run as fast as you can, little girl!” shouted my father.
There was a flash of white and gold in the dim grove as tonight’s prey took off running. A roar went up from the men, but it quickly turned to low titters of confusion. She wasn’t running into the forest, away from the crowd. She was running toward us.
She reached up and ripped the mask off, then pulled the white gag out of her mouth. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy from crying. “Daddy!” she cried, kneeling in front of the masked men, throwing herself at their mercy. “Please don’t let them kill me! Please!”
Davenport removed his bull mask and stepped forward, thunderstruck. “Mellie? What the fuck?” He knelt down and slid his arms around her. “What happened?”
A sob jackknifed through Mellie’s chest. “I… I don’t know. All I remember is… someone drugged me. I don’t know who. Then I woke up, and I was tied up and gagged, and there was a mask on me. People were calling me Tatum and telling me it was time for me to be hunted. I thought I was going to die!”
A smirk curled up my lips. She’d always looked a lot like Tatum. Same height, similar figure, same hair color. Even the exact same eye color. If you looked at a photo of the two of them together, you might wonder if they were sisters or cousins.
Mellie’s facial features were sharper, her nose slightly bigger, and her eyes farther apart, but with the mask on, she could easily pass for Tatum without any of the society members suspecting a thing until it came off. They only saw what they wanted to see: a petite brunette with pale skin and blue eyes, shrieking and moaning, desperate to be freed.
“Who drugged you?” Davenport said sharply.
“I told you, I don’t remember!” Mellie cried.
She couldn’t speak after that, words disintegrating into wrenching sobs and screams as Davenport held her.
“Fuck!” my father shouted, ripping his mask off and throwing it to the leafy ground. He strode over to the guards who brought Mellie out. “What the hell is this?”
The one on the left trembled in his boots. “Sir, we had no idea. She was already masked and gagged when we went up to the mansion to collect her. We honestly thought it was Tatum.”
“For fuck’s sake, go and find the real Tatum! Now!”
The guards scurried out of the grove, and my father wiped his forehead. Beads of perspiration were dotting his skin already. He wasn’t used to looking foolish and disorganized in front of his subordinates.
“Everyone, shut up for a second!” he barked, waving his hand at the crowd of confused members. “It looks like Tatum Marris has pulled yet another vanishing act, but we’re not going to let her get away with it. As far as I’m concerned, the hunt is still on. We’re going to find her and give her exactly what she deserves!”
An excited roar went up from the members at the back. The ones at the front were quieter. “Where the hell could she have gotten to?” one of them asked. It was Matthew Towne, the member who helped the council with their trick knife scheme during my final trial.
“I don’t fucking know, but she’s obviously not here,” my father snapped, looking toward the thick trees surrounding us. He scraped a hand through his hair and let out a frustrated puff of air. Then he raised his brows and turned back to the other men, straightening his posture. “Actually, I know where she might’ve gone. The Catacombs. She knows they exist because I took her down there once. I bet she got out of her room somehow and found one of the hidden entrances.”
“Perhaps,” Davenport muttered. He dragged Mellie to her feet. “I’m going to get my daughter back to the mansion. Once she’s settled, I’ll rejoin the hunt.”
“I’ll round up all the other guards to help look for Tatum, and then I’ll review the security footage. She’ll be on there somewhere,” Chuck Van der Veer added, his face dark with fury.
“All right.” My father clapped his hands loudly and cleared his throat, getting everyone’s attention again. “Go back to the house and start searching. She might not actually be in the Catacombs; that’s just the most likely hiding place. I want every room checked. Every corner, every fucking cupboard.”
There was a dull roar of anticipation as the men milled around, splitting off into smaller search party groups. Others went off on their own, dashing out of the grove and up the path toward the Lodge without a word, obviously hoping to be the first to find Tatum so they could have all the glory.
Amongst all the confusion and excitement, I slipped away from the crowd and headed right into the forest—the one place none of them were looking yet.
It made sense for them to initially discount the woods as a hiding spot, because they would naturally presume that Tatum would head somewhere different to the place she was supposed to be hunted in. We’d counted on them following that exact path of logic when we came up with our plan, and so far, it seemed to be working perfectly.
The plan seemed quite simple on the surface—switch Tatum with Mellie to create a distraction long enough for us to slip away—but it was complicated as hell and fraught with danger.
What I really wished I could do in the first place was take Tatum out of her room and simply drive away. Unfortunately, that wasn’t possible. All cars were searched by the hard-nosed gate guards before leaving the property, just in case an errant member ever felt the urge to try and take his slave home with him. The food and liquor delivery vans were thoroughly searched as well, so sneaking her out in one of those wasn’t an option either.
We needed something more underhanded. Something they wouldn’t see coming; something that would cause enough of a commotion to give us time to run before we were noticed. And so our switch plan was formulated with Mellie in a starring role, unbeknownst to her.
I’d never really socialized all that much with Mellie, but she was always on my radar, given that she was Henry Davenport’s sister, not to mention how frequently she hung around th
e Lodge. I never realized how deeply she was involved in the society, though, not until Tatum happened to tell me what a monstrous little witch she was during one of our many chats a couple of days ago. That was when I got the bright idea to rope her into our scheme.
On the day before the hunt, I went to one of the medical wings in the mansion and asked one of the nurses for some of the knockout drugs they gave the captives when they were unruly. Tatum told me all about it. Apparently she’d had it administered to her a couple of times at the Finishing School in glasses of juice.
I told the nurse it was for a misbehaving slave, and she gave it to me easily enough. She knew who I was, after all.
After that, I went to find Mark, the amenable guard from the day before. I offered him my watch (worth over twenty grand) if he agreed to help me with my ‘prank’. All he had to do was ensure he was on the guard shift outside Tatum’s room on the day of the hunt. If any members, staff, or other guards tried to enter at any point to prepare the prey for the evening, he was to tell them in an officious tone that it had already been taken care of by other staff members, as ordered by Mr. King.
Of course, he wouldn’t specify which Mr. King, exactly…
Eager to please, Mark agreed to go along with the plan immediately. He had no idea what I was really up to, so as far as he knew, he was getting thousands of dollars just to help with a dumb prank against the rest of the society. Poor guy would get blasted when everyone realized what he’d inadvertently done, but that was simple collateral damage.
For the greater good, as they say.
This morning, I went to Mellie’s room and laid on the charm. I told her I always thought she was sexy as fuck, and because of that, I wanted her help with something. I said I felt an urge to torture Tatum one last time before the hunt, and therefore I wanted to fuck Mellie right in front of her, forcing her to watch the man she loved with the woman she hated the most.
Mellie loved the idea, just like I knew she would. Evil little bitch. She happily accompanied me to Tatum’s room, and Tatum screamed and cried with faux jealousy and rage as soon as she stepped inside. She was an excellent actress.
I offered Mellie a secretly-drugged glass of wine, ostensibly to loosen her up before we did the deed (a little trick I learned from Tatum, seeing as she once did it to me). Within minutes, she was unconscious on the bed. Tatum told me the drugs usually kept a person asleep for somewhere between six to eight hours, and once they were awake again, their memory wouldn’t function properly for a while.
That was just what we needed.
The hunt officially started at seven, but all third-level members were expected in the maple grove at six-thirty, right after dinner. We knocked Mellie out at ten a.m., which meant she would be well and truly awake by the time she was scheduled to arrive at the hunt in Tatum’s place.
We dressed her in the clothes and shoes Tatum was supposed to wear (delivered to the door by a maid and then passed on to us by Mark, our unsuspecting aide). Then we gagged her, tied her up, put the requisite golden mask on her, and left her on the bed to sleep off the drugs.
At half past five, I left the suite for dinner. I had to make an appearance there, or someone might begin to suspect I was up to something. While I was doing that, Tatum watched over Mellie to make sure nothing too serious happened when she finally woke up.
When two of the Lodge guards were ordered to go to her room and collect her for the hunt, Mark let them in and helped them take Mellie out, believing it was Tatum all the while. The poor guy was too dim to notice that Mellie had never left the room after entering earlier.
As they carried the struggling, moaning young woman out of the room, Tatum hid in one of the large cupboards in her walk-in closet. After that, she had to act fast. She dressed in dark clothing with a hood and slipped out of the room—now unguarded, as everyone thought she was being taken down to the grove—and headed out a back entrance toward the forest. She told me she’d found some sort of tree hollow to hide in last time she tried to escape through the woods, and we’d decided she would hide there again until I was able to join her.
Because she’d only been there once in the middle of the night, she wasn’t entirely sure she’d be able to find it again, so I’d spent part of the previous day searching through the woods with her vague directions in mind so that I could find the hollow myself and create a path for her. Once I’d located it, I left bright yellow reflective ribbons tied to certain branches on my way out. Seeing as Tatum would be running through the forest at dusk, it would still be light enough for her to see the ribbons and find her way there before it got too dark.
Or so I hoped.
It was much harder for me to find my way to the hollow when it was my turn to run. I’d entered the forest from the grove, which was nowhere near the part Tatum entered from, and with all the other shit I had going on over the last two days, I hadn’t had time to figure out exactly how to get there from my entry point, let alone leave markers to guide me. It was pitch dark now, anyway, so I just had to rely on my mental map and my natural sense of direction to get me there.
I didn’t have long. It was only a matter of time before all the relevant security footage was located and viewed, revealing my involvement in the escape attempt, and soon, Mellie was sure to regain all her memories and recall what I’d done to her as well. When that happened, everyone would eventually realize I hadn’t exited the grove with the rest of them, and they’d figure out I was still in the forest.
That meant we had an hour or two at the most before they started hunting us properly.
It was eerily quiet as I dashed through the woods, just the light patter of drizzling rain on the trees and bushes around me and the crunch of my shoes on sticks and leaves. I thought I’d still be able to hear all the shouting from back in the grove as everyone tried to figure out what to do, but the forest seemed to swallow up all of that sound and spit it back out in the direction of the Lodge.
The deeper I went, the darker and eerier it got. It began to feel as if I were lost in a sea of blackness, doomed to wander the woods for all eternity. Low branches like gnarled hands clawed at me and spiky bushes scratched at my legs, somehow sticking all the way through my thick pants. The pungent scent of loam and moss choked my throat with each frantic breath, but I didn’t stop.
I couldn’t. I had to get to Tatum before someone else did.
I was far enough away from the grove now that I could safely turn on a flashlight. Whipping it out of my pocket, I aimed it ahead, and I let out a victorious whoop. One of the yellow markers I’d put up for Tatum was reflecting back at me, somewhere to the northeast. I was getting close.
Spurred on by the sight of the marker, I ran even faster, my feet easily carrying over the roots and rocks now that I had a light to guide me. Ten minutes later, I arrived at the gaping tree hollow.
I flashed the light on and off a few times to draw Tatum’s attention. Then I stuck my head into the entrance.
“Hey. It’s me,” I said in a stage whisper.
Silence.
My heart began to pound faster as adrenaline and fear flooded through me. What if she got lost? Or what if someone caught her trying to slip out of the mansion earlier, and she never even made it to the forest in the first place?
“Tatum?” My voice was hoarse with emotion. I needed her to be here. Needed her to make it.
A rustling sound came from somewhere deep within the hollow, and Tatum emerged a second later, her hair tangled and her hands smudged with dirt. Moonlight cut through the sparse canopy in this part of the woods, leaving stripes across her cheeks from the shadows of the leaves. It looked like war paint.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was totally exhausted after the mad dash through the forest. I must’ve fallen asleep for a second.”
“You gave me a fucking heart attack,” I muttered, dropping the flashlight and pulling her into a tight hug. “Thank god it worked. You made it.”
“Yeah. Everyone was so distracted
by tonight’s feast in the west courtyard that no one even noticed me sneaking out of the mansion. No guards, not even one of the other girls. How did it go on your end?” she said, her voice slightly muffled by my chest.
“Just as we hoped. They all thought it was you until the last second. Then as soon as they realized it was Mellie, they freaked out and started running around like fucking headless chickens. I managed to creep away without anyone seeing me.”
“I wish I could’ve seen Mellie’s face when she was there,” she murmured, pulling back and flashing me a wry smile.
“It was priceless. I might’ve actually felt a little bad for her if she hadn’t been so nasty to you.” I gestured toward the hollow. “Did you bring anything? If so, you should get it. We need to start moving as soon as possible.”
She nodded. “I brought a little bag of stuff. Some warm clothing, socks, toothbrush. Just the essentials, in case you forgot anything.”
She crouched down and ducked back into the hollow to get it. I nervously paced around the small clearing as I waited. Then I froze. Coming from somewhere to my left was the telltale sound of shoes crunching over dried leaves.
“Tatum, stay where you are,” I hissed.
I obviously wasn’t loud enough. She emerged from the hollow as the footsteps drew closer, her expression completely oblivious.
“Shit, you found her!” said a masculine voice a few seconds later. “Goddammit. I thought I’d be first for once.”
Tatum let out a yelp of horror, and I stepped in front of her protectively as the man emerged from the shadows.
It was Matthew Towne.
7
Tatum
