“Hmmm.”
Was that a smile?
“Why am I not surprised?” She mutters the end of her sentence, but I catch it anyway.
“Veronica, what’s The Hunt about?”
She sighs, looking up to the sky. It’s then I realize we’re on a full moon, and not just any full moon, but a blood moon.
“Every blood moon, witches join for festivities called The Hunt. It’s meant for reproduction. Nothing more, and nothing less.” She pauses, and even though there’s already an eerie silence to the night, her silence somehow fills it. “I’m hoping things start changing for our Coven, Saint.” We continue through the forest, following the candles through the trees until we come to a clearing where ivy and flowers twist and knot around an archway. We stop. The soft orange light illuminates and warms my skin.
“Once you enter this game, there’s no opting out.” Veronica’s hand is gripped around the ivy that blankets off whatever is on the other side. “Are you ready?”
I think over her words. Witches and… would that make them warlocks? The Hunt. Deep in the back of my mind, I know that Brantley would despise me being a part of anything to do with any one of the male species, let alone male witches. But his betrayal still stings, so I can’t seem to bring myself to care. He put me here. He obviously trusts Veronica, for reasons I still don’t know, so he will have no one else to blame but himself.
I bring my eyes to Veronica. Wolf gray against dark brown. “I’m in.”
Tick.
Tock.
I craned my head, taking a seat beside her in the corner. “Are you ever going to stand?”
“Why do you keep doing this to me?”
“Now, now…” I silenced her with a finger pressed against her soft lips. I licked my own. She was so delicious. I’d always seen the obsession. “Don’t kill my dream too soon. It has only been two visits.”
“Two?” She narrowed her eyes at me, and I had to admit, she had balls. No doubt they came from her caretaker. “You’ve been doing this for months, only in different ways.”
“Ah.” A smirk curved my lips. “I guess I have. Tell me something…” I turned to her fully. “Are he and I the same?”
She clenched her jaw. “No.”
“Oh, don’t be so kind to him.”
“I’m not,” she purred, tilting her head back to rest on the concrete wall, unaffected by the way moss was growing between the cracks. “He’s so much worse.”
A deep chuckle erupted from my gut as I stood to my full height and started walking backward. “You say that like I’m not sent from Hades himself.” I tapped on the single light bulb. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.
“Maybe.” She smiled, and it tilted me off-balance at how confident she was, even in the eye of an enemy. “But what does that tell you about him, if not even you scare me?”
She was brave, I’d give her that, but if she wanted to play games, all right then. We’d play.
I punched the light bulb, and everything went black.
Brantley
It was dark. I didn’t know what I wanted or needed to do, but I always somehow found myself in front of Saint’s bedroom. As if my soul ached for her while my flesh bled through my pain. This time was different, though. I finished a job like always, but this one. Was. Different. This one would impact her in years to come, and I knew that. I knew that if at any time I could free her from the cage I’d built around her, this… this would come back to haunt her. Fucking Lucan.
I opened her door, not caring fuck all if she heard. I never came home much anymore, but I needed to see her. To check on her. Ending another life always made me want to see her still living hers. As if I needed reassurance that God hadn’t started punishing me because he knew the first place to start.
Nothing good would ever come to me, and the only good I had in my life I had to fucking force to keep. I was a piece of shit. That was a given. But as she breathed the same air we did, smiled whenever she saw me, and walked along the haunted floors of the Vitiosis Manor, I knew. I fucking knew it was all going to be worth it. She was going to be worth it.
The door slammed against her wall and the bottle of rum I had clutched in my hand dropped to the floor as I clenched the doorframe with the same hand. She shuffled in her bed before her body shifted up and her soft little voice sang out, “Brantley? What are you doing? It’s—God, it’s four a.m.” Not a hint of fear in her tone. She had never been afraid of me. Not when I’d come home with blood on my clothes and a haunted kind of darkness in my eyes. Not ever. She was never afraid. That scared me most about her.