Page 4 of Stream & Scream

CHAPTER TWO

Jaxen

Night one

I watch her from the tree line, crouched low in the bramble like a feral creature. Not breathing. Not blinking. Not fucking human.

She moves like she’s done this before. Not the bullshit influencer version—the real thing.

Not the cosplay survivalists who cry for their Twitch chat the second a branch snaps.

Nah. Liv? She walks like someone who’s been hunted .

Cornered. Taught the hard way that no one’s coming to save her.

So she became the thing they all should’ve feared.

Every step she takes is intentional . Efficient.

No wasted movement. No fucking panic. Her eyes rake the dark like she expects it to stare back.

Like maybe she already knows I’m here, watching.

Maybe she feels me—right there at the base of her spine.

I bet her skin’s tingling. I bet her pulse is climbing.

But still… she doesn’t run.

She just narrows those pretty little eyes. Sharp, steady, and keeps walking.

And fuck if that doesn’t make my dick hard.

She’s not going to cry for the cameras or beg for likes. Her descent will be art.

So I reroute the drone, framing it just right. Making sure every fucking second gets captured.

My thumb glides over the trigger clipped to my inside rig—an override toggle jacked from black market military surplus and rewired.

One flick, and I own her. Unit Nine—red-eyed, silent, loyal —veers off its assigned arc and locks onto her from above.

All visual, all audio, all telemetry now feeds directly to my HUD.

From this point forward, I see what she sees. Every twitch of her fingers. Every shiver she tries to hide. Every half-caught breath she thinks no one hears. If she gets close enough, I’ll even hear that pretty little heart of hers flutter like a rabbit in a snare.

Her pulse belongs to me now.

And when they find out? Oh, they’ll lose it.

The producers. The crew. Milo Vane—the washed-up puppet master in a spray-tan suit who talks like he invented fear. He’ll have a full-blown meltdown. Smash another bottle of imported whiskey. Demand a system sweep.

Because I rewrote the rules, asshole.

Because she is the game now.

They won’t get it. They never do. They think this show’s about suspense. About ratings. About pushing limits. But me? I’m not here for the viewers. I’m not here for the payday. The thrill that sends a rush of adrenaline right to my fucking dick.

I’m here for her.

For Liv.

For the twitch of her lashes when she senses something she can’t see. For the silence she clings to when everything else cracks. For the way she doesn’t cry. Doesn’t beg. Doesn’t perform .

She survives.

And that’s the kind of girl I can finally fucking break .

But not yet.

No. This type of masterpiece isn’t something I can rush. This is about control. It’s about stringing her along one heart-pounding second at a time. Until the fear tastes sweet and the chase turns addicting. Until she wants to be caught.

So let Milo scream.

Let the crew rip out cables and piss themselves trying to rewire the grid.

Let the fans wonder why her feed’s the only one that doesn’t cut to commercial.

Because this isn’t their show anymore.

It’s mine.

And Liv?

She’s the only one on this roster who matters. The rest are extras in her finale.

Well… maybe not everyone. Milo Vane’s a slippery fuck. He’s got that look—like he’s already seen this show before. Like he remembers Lamal.

Yeah, he watched the feed. Start to finish. I bet he replayed the ending

I roll my shoulders, crack my neck once to the left.

The trees press in around me. Moonlight fractures through the canopy. The cold is nothing. The weight of the helmet in my hand, though? That’s holy. I run my thumb over the edge of the shell, feel the grooves of paint, the blackened teeth, the slit for breath. It's not just part of the game.

It’s who I become.

They called me the Butcher of Lamal.

A title that clings like dried blood—stuck under your fingernails no matter how many times you scrape and scrub.

I didn’t ask for it. Didn’t want it. Didn’t give a single fuck about the label. But they gave it to me anyway. Crowned me the second those tunnels turned red.

When the comms cut out. When the food ran dry. When the screaming started and didn’t stop.

When the rules stopped mattering.

When the human in me died.

You learn a lot about a man when he’s buried alive with twelve others and oxygen runs out.

You learn even more when he’s the one dragging his body toward the only exit, and the others don’t make it out.

Lamal was supposed to be a recon op.

In and out. Basic sweep. High-risk zone, yeah, but we’d trained for that.

I was point as always. The one they pushed forward when things got messy.

Because I never blinked. I never fucking missed. And I never questioned the order.

But they forgot one thing.

You can’t bury a wolf and expect it to play dead.

Day three, the cave-in sealed us off from the surface. No comms. No extraction.

We lost two men under the rockfall. Couldn’t dig them out. Just dust and red-soaked hands.

Day five, the rations ran out. Water was next. The air started to stink.

By day seven, one of the corporals snapped. Tried to stab another guy over a pack of gum. I stopped him.

Permanently .

By day eight, the rest started breaking—minds first, then rules. They cried. Screamed. Pleaded for light, for rescue, for forgiveness. But I wasn’t interested in any of that.

By day ten, I started to like the way screams sounded in the limestone. The way they bounced off the rock, sharp and jagged, like music. Like goddamn worship.

By day twelve, I stopped waiting. Started making order out of chaos. One by one, I cut them down. Not because I had to. Because it was the only fucking thing that made sense.

By day fifteen, I was the only one left. And it was quiet.

They found me like that—kneeling in the dark, smiling. Hands soaked up to the wrists in red that wasn’t mine. Eyes wide behind the glass of my goggles, reflecting blood like a fucking mirror.

They gagged from the smell before they even pulled me out. Dragged me into the light like I was some rabid dog, muzzle strapped on tight, too scared to look me in the eye.

They said I snapped. Maybe I did. Or maybe I evolved.

Maybe I realized that pretending to be human in a world like this is what gets you killed.

You want to survive? You’ve gotta become the thing the dark’s afraid of.

And I did. I became it so fucking completely, they didn’t know what to do with me. The discharge came fast.

No trial. No press. No fucking therapy.

Just a paper trail and a plane ticket. A muzzle of silence and a check with enough zeroes to keep me quiet. They dumped me back in the States and hoped I’d disappear. Fade like smoke. Like a ghost.

Instead, I found Milo Vane. Or maybe he found me. That slippery little rat always had a nose for ruin. For blood.

“You ever think about going pro?” he asked me, like he wasn’t already jerking himself off to the Lamal tapes and body cam footage that got leaked. He slid a folder that reeked of gunpowder and death onto the bar. I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.

He grinned like he could already taste it. “All those instincts. All that damage. You wanna rot in a basement somewhere, or you wanna put that darkness to use?”

He offered me a contract. A mask. A kill count.

A fucking game.

I didn’t even blink. I took the alias of the hunter and made it my fucking face. My everything .

Because once you learn to like the blood, there’s no going back. Once you hear what a scream sounds like when it’s real—when it’s earned —you stop craving silence. You start craving more.

They think this show made me. But the truth? The truth is… I brought this game with me. They just gave it a spotlight.

Back in the woods, the timer ticks in my ear.

Sixty seconds until it begins.

Olivia is crouched now, hand brushing over a crumbled log, her eyes tracking something in the dark.

She doesn’t fidget. Doesn’t play for the drone.

Doesn’t flirt with the camera, giggle, scream or beg for more followers.

The others are doing all of that. Tara won’t stop bitching about the lighting.

Riley’s shirtless despite the cold and flexing like his pecs are gonna save him.

Lexie’s holding her wristwatch out like she's adjusting her makeup in the tiny camera.

Liv just moves.

Effortless. Smart.

No wasted steps.

I can’t see her full file. Milo keeps the good ones locked. But I’ve pieced together enough.

And I want to see what it takes to break her.

Thirty seconds.

I slide the helmet over my head. The inside smells like old leather and sweat. It hums when I breathe. My vision shifts—thermal overlay, heat signatures. Liv glows like a heartbeat in the dark.

My hands flex around the knife at my side. Not drawn yet. Not for her. Not until she earns it.

I’ve killed a hundred of them. Pretty girls with fake cries. Tough guys who crumple once the game turns real. This one’s different.

This one… might actually survive.

But only if I let her.

Ten seconds.

The voice of Milo Vane cracks through the trees, loud and too fucking bright.

“Contestants—lights are green. Let the show begin. Make it count.”

The forest doesn’t change. Not to the eye.

But I feel it.

That shift in the air. That moment where the world tilts, where every tree becomes a corridor and every step could end in death. The camera drones rise. The signal beeps green.

And I move.

Not toward her.

Not yet.

Let her breathe a little.

Let my little clickbait run.

I want to see how far she gets before I decide to take her apart.