“You asshole.” I threw the last bite of my food at him, and it bounced off his face. He snatched it out of the air before it could hit the cave floor and popped it in his mouth.
Worth it.
“It is pretty fuckin’ wild,” he muttered after he swallowed, glancing toward the cave entrance with a serious expression on his face.
Lachlan seemed like the kind of guy who liked to laugh and who tried to make the most out of whatever situation he found himself in.
But right now, he looked about how I felt—pensive and on edge.
Just the thought of having to go back out there and move on with the competition without any extra rest time and all by myself made me a bit frustrated.
There was a small part of me that didn’t really want to split up, but I knew we had to.
We were competitors, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention the fact that for the first few weeks of school, he, Merrick, and Trace had all been dicks to me, going out of their way to give me shit just because my presence threatened their fragile masculinity or whatever.
But does any of that matter now? a small voice in my head asked. Isn’t surviving the challenge more important?
Well, yeah. Surviving—maybe even winning—the challenge was the most important thing. But that was the exact reason why teaming up was such a bad idea. At least on my own, I wouldn’t have to worry about being betrayed when it mattered most.
I’d just have to worry about being eaten by some monster that was too big for me to fight off on my own.
Great.
When we were done eating, Lachlan didn’t even try to scam the pack from me. He just helped me put everything back inside, and we headed out into the humid heat of the jungle again.
After scrambling up the three-foot incline into the jungle brush, we stood there staring at each other for a moment. Then Lachlan shrugged. “Well, good luck to ye, Aria Banks. I’m sure we’ll run across each other again.”
He gave me a head nod, his red-brown hair glinting in the early morning light, then walked off in the opposite direction of where I was headed.
I had no idea if he knew where I’d been planning to go or not—our conversation in the cave had been civil, but we’d carefully avoided talking about our strategies or plans.
Not the kind of stuff you want to share with your competition.
I waited until he was out of sight, wanting to make sure that he wasn’t going to come back around to try to steal the pack. He didn’t, which was good considering I was still slightly thrown off from the night before.
One more round of sparring with him, and I might’ve made a seriously stupid mistake.
I spent the next few hours trekking through the jungle, just like the day before. The morning became a monotonous blur of brushing sweat off my brow, shoving vines out of my way, and listening to odd animals make strange sounds from the trees above me.
At one point, the babble of rushing water drew me off course, and I found another stream and sucked down water gratefully.
My head felt clearer as I continued on, but with no one to talk to, my thoughts spiraled around and around in my head.
Frustratingly, they seemed to land on a certain Irish mountain of a man way more often than they should’ve.
Did Lachlan know about the structure off in the distance? If he did, he’d obviously decided it wasn’t worth checking out, since he had gone off in the complete opposite direction of me.
Was my hunch completely wrong?
It was nothing but a hunch, an instinctual feeling that if there was a structure of any kind in this wild jungle, it meant something.
Hopefully there’ll be a clue there.
Otherwise, I’d be back to square one with no leads.
After hours, and at least three fights with vines that seemed to wrap themselves around me with their own snappy personalities, I finally reached the structure.
It was much larger than I’d originally guessed when I’d seen it from the top of the tree. It was a huge dome, so big it took me almost twenty minutes to walk around the entire thing. And as I came back to the spot where I’d started, I realized that there was no entrance.