Page 64 of Stream & Scream
I surge forward, fist snagging the back of his shirt, yanking him straight off his feet. He screams as we slam into the dirt, rolling through mud and tangled roots. His long limbs thrash, sneakers kicking clumps of dirt and fallen pine needles, fists clawing at anything that isn’t me.
“Yeah, fight me,” I growl, pinning him down, helmet grinding against his cheek as he bucks beneath me. “Give them something to fucking watch.”
An elbow cracks across my helmet, hard enough to smear blood across the visor in a red arc. My grin stretches under the mask.
“Now that,” I snarl, pressing him down by the throat until the ground itself caves beneath him, “is more like it.”
He bucks hard, fights like a man who doesn’t want to die easy, and it makes my blood sing. The trill of the hunt burns through me. Finally, a runner who doesn’t just fold, who makes me work for the break.
I let him slip free. Watch him stumble up and limp into the brush, bleeding, panicked, still stupid enough to think distance will save him.
I don’t chase. Not yet.
I stalk.
Because Malik Carter just turned himself into my next fucking hunt.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Olivia
Sunday night
Aloud pounding at the door has me jerking upright, jumping to my feet as quickly as I can. I’d started to doze off. The night was too quiet to fight off sleep any longer.
Heavy fists against wood, the sound echoes through the abandoned ranger station like gunshots in the pre-dawn darkness. Someone is trying to get in, trying to force their way past the barricade I built.
"Help!" The voice is male, panicked, filled with hysteria. Like he’s being hunted... "Help, I know you're in there! Open the fucking door!"
Malik.
His voice has changed since our last encounter, stripped of his carefully chosen words and falsely calm demeanor. This feels more like the real him, like he’s been stripped raw from the fear of being hunted.
"Please!" He pounds again, harder this time, and I see the furniture rattling as my barricade starts to fail under the weightof him pressing into the door. "Someone’s out there! He’s going to kill me if you don’t let me in. Please let me in!"
I press my back against the furniture, throwing my full weight behind the failing defense, but I'm not strong enough to hold it indefinitely against someone twice my size and running on an adrenaline high.
"Goddammit, let me in! It killed them! It killed all of them! I’m next, don’t you get it?" His fists hammer against wood, and I can feel the vibrations through my spine where it's braced against the door. "I'm the only one left! We're the only ones left!"
The only ones left. The words wash over me like a bucket of ice water, freezing my thoughts and making me hyperaware of exactly how isolated I am in this rotting hell-hole. If Malik is telling the truth, if everyone else is dead, then that changes everything.
I’m not letting him in. I can’t.
If it’s down to me and him, I want to be the one walking out of here alive.
"Go away, Malik," I call through the door, trying to keep my voice steady despite the fear clawing its way up my throat. "Find somewhere else to hide."
"There is nowhere else!" His voice cracks entirely now, breaking into a sob. "We can fight him off tog?—"
The pounding stops abruptly.
Complete silence falls over the forest like a blanket, so sudden that my ears ring in the absence of sound. There’s no wind whistling through the trees, no settling noises from the old building, no distant sounds of night creatures scurrying over the forest floor.
There’s only silence. It feels like a horror movie. In my gut I know something terrible is about to happen to him.
"Malik?" I whisper, but there's no response from the other side of the door.
I wait, holding my breath while straining to hear something,anythingat all. But there’s nothing.
