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SANJANA

Music drifted from the TV, a fitting playlist on my Spotify that matched my mood and gave me some background noise.

I was curled up in Ryder’s old hoodie and a pair of long fuzzy socks, comfortable, but not quite settled.

I’d kept myself busy with a combination of homework and house chores.

Anything to keep my thoughts from drifting back to the night prior and everything that happened before the shitshow at The Nest.

I had done a decent job of putting my focus elsewhere.

I even managed to lock in a day with the girls next week to get our nails filled and shop for the last pieces of our costumes before we were stuck scraping the bottom of the barrel to finish our looks.

Hunt or no Hunt, we weren’t missing the Soirée Nick was hosting.

By the time that party hit, we’d be just hours away from winning, the damn thing.

Was that borderline delusional, considering how sideways everything had gone the past few days?

Absolutely. But delusion was just a coin toss away from determination in my book.

I smothered a yawn and debated if I wanted to throw pants on for a Hemlock I simply wanted to be done.

The only reason I hadn’t told him right then was to stop us from being an even bigger spectacle than we had started to be.

Stretching, I glanced at the half-finished math assignment spread across the coffee table.

My textbook lay open to a chapter on proportional models and compound interest, but the formulas on the page looked more like hieroglyphics than anything I could reason through.

I’d only managed to solve two of the twenty problems, and for the past fifteen minutes, I’d just been staring at equation three, wondering how it was even possible for a single problem to include both logarithms and nested parentheses.

Quantitative Reasoning, my ass.

When was I ever going to use this skill in the real world?

I needed a break.

With a quiet sigh, I plugged my phone into the charger and sank back into the couch, curling my legs under me.

It wasn’t that late, a little after seven, but the sky outside was already swallowed in darkness.

No masked assholes had shown up, though.

So that was something. The last text I’d received was from earlier that morning, and the words had etched themselves into the back of my mind like a splinter I couldn’t dig out:

Every friend group has a weak link.

I wonder which one of you will snap first.

I didn’t reply, but I briefly wondered if I would be considered our weakest link.

Now it felt like a matter of when, not if, the next shoe would drop.

This was one of those things I was actively trying not to think about, especially while home alone.

Arianna, Roxxi, and Cloe wouldn’t be back for almost another hour or so.

They each had something scheduled that had been planned long before this whole Marked thing came about.

I’d chosen to stay back. I needed to prove I could be home alone.

I couldn’t spend the next few weeks jumping at shadows and screaming at creaking floorboards.

I promised to call the second anything felt off.

The house was locked up tight. Every door was double-checked, and all the curtains were drawn.

The glass company and whoever was installing our security system were scheduled to come out that weekend.

Rational Sanjana said we were fine at the moment and there was nothing to worry about.

The other part of me wasn’t so easily convinced.

Someone had been inside our house. Someone called out to me at The Nest. When I told the girls what I’d heard and showed the accompanying text, none of them played it cool.

Cloe launched into a full-blown legal rant. Roxxi said we needed to carry fuck around and find out bags at all times. Ari suggested we do something drastic to make our Huntsmen second-guess who they were messing with.

And that was another problem entirely.

We didn’t have the first clue about who any of the Huntsmen were or how many had placed their wagers on us. The one who sent that text could have been anyone inside the diner or lingering outside.

When the washer began to play its tune for a completed cycle, I grabbed my hydrobottle to refill and remembered there were still toaster strudels in the freezer.

Small comforts. I filled the bottle with ice and water, the sharp clink of cubes echoing through the kitchen.

After popping two strawberry strudels into the toaster, I took a long sip as I headed downstairs.

The wooden steps creaked beneath my fuzzy socks.

Our basement wasn’t as nice as the rest of the house, but it was finished, clean, and organized despite the fact that no matter how many times we mopped or swapped out Febreze plug-ins, it had a faintly damp, unmistakable basement-y smell that mingled with the synthetic sweetness of Midnight Linen .

There was not much down there except a few boxes of seasonal decorations and some of Roxxi’s biker gear.

The bright red front-loaders along the far wall stood out like they were trying to be cheerful.

I knelt in front of the washer and opened the door.

Steam drifted out as I started transferring the damp clothes into the dryer beside it, the soft thump of wet fabric hitting metal forming a quiet rhythm.

A light thud followed by a creak from above me had my hand stilling.

My gaze lifted to the ceiling.

Every nerve in my body went tight. I slowly stood, letting the last shirt drop into the dryer, and shut the door gently, trying not to make noise.

For a moment, I considered the possibility that it might be Ryder.

He had a habit of showing up without warning, but it was Thursday, and Ryder always hit the gym with the guys after his team walkthroughs.

I turned toward the stairs, and the music from the TV abruptly stopped.

One second it was there, faint but steady, the next, silence.

I knew without a doubt someone was inside the house.

There was no way someone had broken in, though, right?

Unless…

I thought back to the window in my bathroom.

It was on the second floor, still taped up.

The climb wouldn’t be difficult for someone who knew what they were doing.

Ryder and I had scaled worse during our late-night escapes.

I patted my hoodie pocket and then scanned the top of the washer and dryer for my phone.

“Goddamnit,” I swore under my breath, realization crashing down.

I’d left it in the living room, plugged in to charge.

What was wrong with me? I needed a class called Dumb Bitch Economics because clearly, making good choices was not my strong suit.

I stood there, trying to convince myself I was imagining things, until footsteps crossed above me.

It couldn’t be one of the girls. If they were home, they’d have called out like they always did.

My mind raced, adrenaline slamming through me like a current.

There was nowhere to hide in this fucking basement.

No closets. No deep corners. Two windows: one specifically for a dryer vent and the other sealed from the outside.

I looked around, searching for anything I could use as a weapon.

My eyes eventually landed on my Hydrobottle.

It was better than nothing. I grabbed it, my knuckles whitening as I held its handle as if it were a bat.

Whoever was upstairs now stood between me and the only way out.

Slowly, I crept toward the staircase, every footstep silent against the cool floor.

The urge to curl up, stay quiet, and hope whoever it was would leave pressed down on me, but I couldn’t stay down there forever.

You can do this. I tried to hype myself up, steadying the trembling that had spread to my fingers.

I gripped the Hydrobottle so tightly I could feel the cold metal biting into my palm.

As I took another careful step, the floorboard beneath me gave a loud creak. My pulse skyrocketed, eyes going wide.

Shit.