That’s a new one, he thinks.

12

Charlotte can see the bear trap. The giant steel jaws have a subtle glint in the branch-filtered moonlight. Maybe they’re fringed with ice. She can’t tell.

She figures the placement’s designed to punish a victim careless enough to lean against the tree trunk in an attempt to catch her breath.

She focuses on it, hoping the sight will flood her system with fear. It’s not working. All she feels is silent, quivering rage.

Anger’s not enough to make bone music. What she needs is stark terror. A sudden shock.

And that’s not as easy to come by when she knows trained mercenaries are perched in the woods nearby watching her every move.

Davies hasn’t tied her wrists tightly; she can get free if she wants. And he’d love her to try, she’s sure. He wants her to run, beg, suffer.

But what she needs is something that will trigger a sense of powerlessness so total it unleashes Zypraxon’s impossible power.

I know too much, she realizes. I let Cole tell me too much about the operation, about how safe I am, about how nothing could go wrong. And now, something actually is wrong. I’m too safe. Too protected. I need . . .

“I see you, lady,” Richard says from somewhere in the shadows behind her. “Not moving much anymore, are you? Don’t be looking for a way out ’cause there isn’t one. This is gonna be about you digging deep and finding out what you’re really made of. And if you’re lucky, you’ll find something stronger and better than you’ve ever been.”

“How many?” she asks.

“What?”

“How many women have you done this to?”

He lets out a small, self-satisfied laugh. “I don’t get interviewed by whores, sweetie. How about you focus on what you’re gonna do next?”

She manages to wriggle her wrists free from her restraints. The loose coil of rope smacks to the snow right as her knees do. There’s a vague structure nearby, some sort of hunting blind. It must be where his voice is coming from.

They all went through this. Trapped in the middle of nowhere, a psychopath addressing them from the shadows like they were feeble children. But the thought brings no terror. Just more anger.

Only a split second separates the puff of air above her head and the deafening crack of the rifle shot. Gooseflesh coats her skin. Has she been triggered? But it passes, leaving a ringing in her ears and a body that feels woefully normal, nothing like the bass beat deep inside her bones that tells her Zypraxon’s in full bloom.

Does he always fire a warning shot? Maybe it’s his way of showing them what a good hunter he is. Or maybe she pissed him off.

“I’ll give you a three-minute head start. Then it gets serious.”

The way she can see it, there are two strategies.

One: piss him off and see if he’ll fire closer, if not right into her leg. They’ve got lab tests galore to prove that a sudden shock on the order of a bullet wound would be more than enough to trigger her. But the wound itself is another story. If it’s bad enough, if it strikes an artery, wreaking untold havoc inside her in the seconds before Zypraxon’s unleashed, there’s no telling whether the drug will heal the initial damage fast enough for her to recover in time to keep fighting.

The second option’s more of a sure thing, but it’s more frightening.

“Three minutes, you fucking whore!” he shouts. “Three minutes and then we find out if you’re worth anything underneath that sack of flesh you’ve been selling.”

Charlotte gets to her feet and runs. She’s not sure if the bear trap she spotted earlier is out of his sight line or not. Either way, there’s no hesitating. As she nears it, she’s hoping the prospect of what she has to do next will trigger her, but it doesn’t. So she runs right up to the trap and sticks her foot into the middle of it.

13

Richard hears a sound like a giant guitar string getting plucked.

What doesn’t come next is the harsh metallic clang of the jaws snapping shut against each other like they do when he tests the thing with a plank. Instead, there’s a soft thud that tells him the trap’s caught flesh and bone.

The woman lets out a high-pitched grunt.

But that’s all.

No gasping. No shrieking. No begging for mercy.

He squints into his night vision goggles.

Probably best that she hit the thing right away, he thinks, given what a mouthy little bitch she turned out to be. Teach her some humility. But shouldn’t she be screaming at least?

Just silence and the thick rustle of ice-clotted tree branches in the cold wind.

He scans the darkness. There’s no sign of her. She’s got to be lying flat. There are enough gaps in the foliage that if she were trying to make a run for it, even crawling on all fours, he’d catch a glimpse of her after a few seconds. But he’s not.

So she’s pressed to the ground, either dead or knocked out from the pain. That would be a new one. Knocked out from the pain, that one he’d believe.

Killed by the trap alone? Doubtful.

Amid these thoughts, he’s feeling something he’s never felt before during a hunt. Confusion. More than that, he realizes.

Fear. A sense that for the first time in his hunting grounds that something is . . . not right.