Page 20 of Bloody Valentine

“I really am sorry, Hailey. You would have been a nice little fuck.” He stepped up closer, running his hand down her cheek and across her jaw, smirking behind that damn mask.

“Ow! She fucking bit me!” Hayes pulled his hand back, flapping it in the air and looking to see if she had broken skin. The last thing we needed was our DNA connected to a crime scene.

I sighed in exasperation, shaking my head and watching the woman take off back toward my location, dodging my immediate area and trying to swerve around me.

“Hayes—”

He cut me off, sprinting after her with more speed than before.

“Yeah, yeah. Don’t start bro.”

I lifted my gun, adjusting the silencer and viewing through the scope at the frantic woman as she continued to run. For a lab tech nerd, she was faster than some athletes we had hunted in the past.

Good for her.

She can take that victory to the grave. Unfortunately, no matter how fast she could run, a bullet was faster.

Hayes was still a ways from her, and I calculated my trajectory. I didn’t want to hit any major artery or end her simply from the bullet.

The ritual had to continue.

She needed to be alive.

Closing my eyes for a second and taking a deep breath, I refocused through the scope.

There!

That slight lapse of slowing down, and I had the perfect shot.

The muffled whizz of the bullet soared through the air and made its mark right into her side. There was a soft cry of pain, and then she was down. Hayes got to the sacrifice’s locationquickly, grabbing her arms and dragging her body along the ground.

The blood trail left on the snow would be seen as nothing more than a deer unlucky enough to meet a hunter. I already had a doe strung up in the back of the university outside near the chapel.

As usual, I would be reprimanded later, but the blood trail was a much-needed distraction to the one we created out here.

“I changed my mind. You would be a shitty lay,” Hayes spat.

I rolled my eyes as I got closer to my brother and the downed female. The large oak tree was not far from our location, and I dug into the bag on my back to find the rope.

With one end of the frayed, scratchy material, I looped the binds around the woman’s legs, intricate in how I overlapped and created the knots repeatedly. The pressure cut into her skin, and her dazed whimpering became more audible.

“Let’s continue. Hayes, bring her to the oak.”

The woman fought uselessly as she was dragged along the snow-covered ground, spitting pleas and insults over and over.

“Let me fucking go, you freaks! They will follow the blood, they’ll find me! You won’t get away with this!”

I smiled sympathetically at the woman, pulling out my phone to review the earlier video. It was of the hunt and bloody chase of the white doe now hanging from the tree in the university’s yard. The fact that I had found such a rare breed only made me think of my Little Virgin.

Boom.

The sound on the screen resembled the one just moments before. The cries of the animal as it took its last breaths were a foreshadowing of her upcoming death.

“As you can see, you are no more than a deer’s demise. People will not only be ignorant of your disappearance but also cheer for the meat.”

Hayes laughed. “Yeah, you heard him. You’re about to be fed to your classmates.”

The girl paled and started to whimper, leaning up to rip at the binds around her ankles to no avail.

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