Page 41

Flint

Death has a particular stench. Not just the metallic tang of blood painting the moonlight silver-black, but something deeper. Older. A reminder that we’re all just walking meat sacks with expiration dates.

Viktor Bastian’s expiration date came about twenty years too late, in my opinion.

I stand over his body, the garden statue still clutched in my hands, its smooth stone surface now slick with blood and matter. My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath, adrenaline making my vision too sharp, too focused.

“Is he...” Briar’s voice comes from somewhere to my left, barely more than a whisper.

I force myself to kneel beside Viktor, pressing my fingers against his neck where a pulse should be. Nothing. Just cooling flesh and the unmistakable stillness of death. A moment ago, this man was breathing, thinking, threatening .

Now he’s just... meat.

“He’s dead.” I sound strangely calm to my own ears.

I look up at Damiano, still struggling to breathe after nearly having his windpipe crushed, then at Briar huddled against the stone bench, blood trickling from her split lip where Viktor struck her.

The moonlight makes her nightgown glow unnaturally white, like some kind of fucked-up ghost bride.

And between us lies Viktor, a spreading pool of darkness seeping from his shattered skull.

Three dead Bastian brothers. One for each of us to carry.

“We need to move.” I drop the statue with a soft thud on the gravel beside Viktor’s body. “Now.”

Damiano nods, rubbing his bruised throat. “Same place,” he manages to rasp.

“Jesus Christ.” A hysterical laugh bubbles up from somewhere deep inside me. “Why not? It’s already turning into a fucking family plot.”

“Stop.” Briar comes across stronger than I expect. She rises unsteadily to her feet, but there’s something hard in her eyes when she looks at Viktor’s body. “We need to think this through first.”

“What’s there to think about?” I gesture to the corpse between us. “Another Bastian brother, another grave. Tradition at this point.”

“Flint,” Damiano says in a broken whisper, but it stops me cold. “She’s right. This is different.”

“How?” I demand, anger surging through me, hot and welcome after the cold shock of what I’ve done. “This piece of shit was going to rape her. Would have killed you. Probably me next. What’s different?”

“There’s a high chance people know he’s here,” Briar says quietly. “At the party, he was talking to Locke. People saw him put on the mask and leave. We can assume people knew he was coming after me.”

The truth of her words hits me like a second blow. Shit. She’s right. Viktor wasn’t some random partygoer like Liam, disappearing into the night unnoticed. He’s the head of security at The Vault. Everyone saw him tonight.

“Fuck.” I exhale, running a blood-streaked hand through my hair. “Fuck!”

“We stick with the truth,” Damiano says, his voice still raw. “As much as we can.”

“Which is what?” I snap. “That I caved his skull in with a garden statue?”

“Self-defense,” Briar says firmly. “He attacked me. You both saved me.” She gestures to her torn nightgown, the blood on her face. “It’s not a lie.”

Damiano and I exchange a look over Viktor’s body.

She’s not wrong. If we’d called the police right now, explained what happened, we might actually get away with it.

Self-defense is plausible. The bruises forming on her wrists, the defensive wounds on her arms, the state of her clothes—they tell the story without us having to say a word .

But there’s Liam. And Erik before him. Too many bodies for coincidence.

“They’ll start digging,” I say, voicing what I know Damiano is thinking. “Literally. If we involve the police on a possible murder investigation, they could search these grounds. Find the other graves.”

Briar’s head snaps up, her eyes widening. “Graves? As in plural?” She looks between us, realization dawning on her face. “You buried Erik here too? In the maze?”

Damiano and I exchange a loaded glance.

“Yes. Near the north corner. It’s why I knew this place would work for Liam. The soil composition, the plants that grow best...” Damiano says.

“This whole maze is basically built on secrets,” I add grimly. “One more layer to it now.”

Briar stares at the ground beneath us, as if she might suddenly see through the soil to the bodies buried below. “So all three Bastian brothers...”

“Ended up at Windward Estate,” I finish for her. “Poetic, in a fucked-up way.”

Briar’s face pales as the full understanding dawns. “We can’t report it. God, we absolutely cannot report it.”

“No, we fucking can’t,” I agree, my mind racing through alternatives, “but we can’t bury him here either. Not with everyone knowing he came after you tonight.”

“So what do we do?” Briar asks, her tone growing desperate .

Damiano kneels beside Viktor’s body, studying it with an eerie detachment that would be disturbing if I didn’t know him so well. “We are going to have to involve them to some degree. No way around it. But we make it look right,” he says finally. “Make the story fit what people would believe.”

“And what story is that?” I ask.

He looks up at me, his eyes dark in the dim light. “Viktor came here for The Hunt, to chase Briar. But he was drunk, high on the mushrooms everyone knows I provide for Heathens. He got lost in the maze, fell, hit his head.”

“An accident,” Briar says slowly, catching on.

“Exactly,” Damiano nods. “People saw him leave The Vault in hunt gear. They’ll believe he came here looking for easy prey, got disoriented, took a bad fall.”

It’s not a terrible plan. But it has flaws.

“The damage to his skull doesn’t match a fall,” I point out. “And what about your throat? Briar’s face? There’s evidence of a fight.”

“We clean up,” Damiano says, rising to his feet with obvious effort. “Wash away our injuries. His, too. And we reshape his wound.”

I stare at him, a cold feeling settling in my gut. “Reshape it how?”

“The stone bench.” He gestures to the ornate marble piece beside Briar. “If he hit it falling from standing height, it would split his skull. We position him right, make it look like he tripped, fell forward onto the corner.”

The clinical way he describes it makes my skin crawl. Damiano’s always been the planner between us, thinking ten steps ahead while I react in the moment. It’s why we complemented each other so well once. Why we were lethal together.

“This is insane,” Briar whispers, but I can tell part of her is considering it. We all are. When the alternative is three murder charges, insanity starts looking pretty reasonable.

“His blood is on that statue.” I point to the makeshift weapon I grabbed in desperation.

“We clean it, put it back,” Damiano says. “Replace it with his blood on the bench. It’s possible. We just need to work fast.”

I look from Damiano to Briar, weighing our options. In the distance, faint and distorted by fog, I hear whistles—The Hunt in full swing across the island. Other hunters, other prey, oblivious to the real predator lying dead at our feet.

“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it. But we need to be thorough. No mistakes.”

For the next hour, we work with grim efficiency. I’ve never seen Briar like this—her hands steady as she helps us position Viktor’s body. The fragile, sick girl I originally mistook her for is nowhere to be found. In her place is someone harder, someone who understands survival at any cost .

We stage the scene carefully, making it look like Viktor stumbled in the dark and hit the corner of the bench at just the right angle to cave in his skull.

Damiano uses his knowledge of plants to create a mixture of crushed leaves and soil that mimics the scattered pattern of someone falling forward.

I clean the stone statue with my shirt, then replace it exactly where I found it.

Briar disappears briefly, returning with a bottle from the main house. “Bourbon,” she explains, pouring some over Viktor’s clothes, splashing his face and hands. “Makes the drunk story more believable.”

Smart. I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Finally, Damiano kneels beside the body, pulling latex gloves from his pocket that he always carries for handling toxic plants.

With clinical precision, he begins manipulating the wound on Viktor’s skull.

His fingers probe the broken edges where my statue had caved in the bone, carefully reshaping the impact point to match the corner of the marble bench.

“We need to make it look like a single impact,” he murmurs, using his thumb to smooth jagged fragments of bone that would reveal multiple blows. “The bench corner would create a cleaner, more concentrated point of impact.”

I watch as he meticulously works, pressing Viktor’s shattered skull against the bench edge to capture the exact pattern of the marble’s ornate corner.

He uses water from a small bottle to wash away blood that doesn’t match the spatter pattern of a forward fall, then deliberately creates new blood spatter by pressing the wound against the bench in the right orientation.

“Head wounds bleed a lot,” he explains, sounding detached as if giving a lecture. “But the pattern matters. A fall forward would send blood in this direction, not that one.”

It’s both fascinating and horrifying to watch him work with such precision, transforming my frenzied attack into what convincingly looks like a tragic accident.

I look away, focusing instead on keeping watch. If another Hunt participant wanders in, we’re fucked.

“How do we explain Briar’s condition?” I gesture to her bruised face, the blood on her nightgown.

Damiano’s hand goes to his own throat, where darkening bruises form a telling pattern. “The Hunt,” he says. “We had our own private Hunt tonight. The three of us.”

I catch his meaning immediately. “Rough play. Not unexpected from us.”