How do you trap a true hunter?
You do not build a cage.
You build a maze.
And you pretend to be the prey, lost in its center.
For three days, Adrian moved through the foothills, a ghost with a purpose.
His broken ribs were a dull, grinding fire, but he fed off the pain. It was a reminder of his failure with Tiberius, a failure of brute force.
A failure he would not repeat.
His father's words about Lysandra echoed in his mind.
"She hunts souls… She uses hope as a lure… To fight her is to fight a mirror."
He could not run. He could not hide. A hunter like that does not follow tracks in the mud. She follows the scent of fear, of desperation.
To act like prey was to be caught.
So, he had to change the game.
He could not let her choose the battlefield. He had to choose it for her. He had to lead her, to make her think she was the one in control, right up until the moment the jaws of the trap snapped shut.
He needed a place. Not a simple canyon or a dense forest.
He needed a place with shadows and whispers. A place with multiple levels, with broken lines of sight. A place with history, with bones.
He found it on a map he had taken from one of Tiberius's dead officers.
The Monastery of the Silent Dusk.
An ancient, abandoned abbey perched on a windswept mountain spur, a skeleton of faith left to be devoured by time.
It was perfect. A stage for a dance of death.
Now, he had to lay the bait.
It had to be clumsy, but not too clumsy. It had to be the trail of a wounded, desperate boy, fleeing for his life.
He began to leave a trail.
He broke a twig here, its white wood a stark wound against the dark forest floor. He pressed a footprint too deep into a patch of soft mud near a stream, the mark of a man stumbling, exhausted.
Further on, he tore a small strip of bloody cloth—the same cloth he had used to bind his hand in the attic—and snagged it on a thorny bush.
It was a calculated risk. The blood would give her a scent. It would confirm her belief that she was hunting a wounded animal.
It was a lie, wrapped in a truth.
Each sign was a word in a sentence. And the sentence read: I am weak. I am afraid. I am running.
It was the most difficult acting of his life. Every instinct screamed at him to be silent, to be invisible.
Instead, he had to learn how to scream in a whisper.
He arrived at the monastery as twilight began to bleed across the sky.
It was even better than the map had suggested.
The structure was a jagged ruin of black stone, a set of broken teeth against the bruised purple sky. The central bell tower had long since collapsed, leaving a gaping maw open to the heavens. Windows were empty eye sockets.
The air was heavy with the silence of forgotten prayers.
This place was already a tomb. He would just be adding one more body to it.
He spent the next hour preparing his stage.
His lessons with Gregor, though years in the past, came flooding back. "A true trap is not a single device. It is a story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end she never sees coming."
The beginning was the trail he had left.
The middle was here.
The main hall of the abbey was a vast, cavernous space. The great wooden floor, weakened by years of rain and rot, was treacherous. Adrian spent a precious hour with his dagger, carefully sawing at the main support beams beneath one large section.
It was his primary trap. A pitfall, crude but effective, hidden under a thin veneer of stability.
But he knew it was not enough. Not for her. His father's words haunted him. She is a mirror.
She would be looking for the obvious. She would expect a trap.
So, he set a second one.
Near the main entrance, hidden in the deep shadows of the narthex, he fashioned a simple tripwire. He used a strand of his own dark hair, almost invisible in the gloom, and connected it to a crossbow he had taken from one of Tiberius's soldiers.
He did not aim it at the chest or the head. He was not trying to kill her. Not yet.
He aimed it at the stone wall opposite the doorway. The quarrel was not a weapon.
It was a word.
A single word to start their conversation.
With his traps set, he ascended into the shattered rafters of the abbey's roof.
He found a perch in the deepest shadows, a spider in its web. From here, he could see the entrance. He could see the main hall.
He wrapped himself in his cloak, becoming one with the cold stone and the dying light.
And he waited.
Patience was the first lesson of the hunter. He made his breathing shallow. His heartbeat slow. He was no longer a boy. He was a stone. He was a shadow.
He waited for the other shadow to arrive.
She came just after the moon had risen, a sliver of bone in the black sky.
She did not come crashing through the undergrowth. She did not come with a squad of soldiers.
She came alone.
She appeared at the edge of the clearing like a wisp of smoke, a silent, silver phantom. Her movements were so fluid, so economical, that she seemed to flow over the ground rather than walk upon it.
Adrian felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. This was her. The Silver Huntress.
She stopped, surveying the ruined monastery. She did not look at the building itself, but at the ground around it. She was reading the last few sentences of the story he had written for her.
She saw the tracks leading to the main door.
And she paused.
Her head was cocked to the side, like a hawk listening for a field mouse. She could feel it. The wrongness. The silence that was too perfect. The tracks that were too clear.
Adrian held his breath. Had he made a mistake? Was it too obvious?
Slowly, she drew her twin swords. They were elegant, curved blades, shorter than a knight's longsword, designed for speed and precision. They slid from their scabbards with a soft, hungry whisper of steel.
She did not enter through the main doors.
She moved to the side, to a collapsed section of wall, and slipped inside, silent as a cat.
Adrian smiled in the darkness. A cold, grim smile.
She was good. She was avoiding the obvious entrance.
Which meant she was now inside, in the dark, where he was king.
She moved through the ruined abbey with a hunter's grace, her silver hair catching the faint moonlight, making her look like a true ghost.
She saw the main hall. She saw the section of floor that looked just a little too clean, a little too inviting.
She recognized the pitfall trap instantly. A novice's mistake. A trap for a charging brute, not for a huntress.
A faint, almost imperceptible smirk touched her lips.
She thought she had her prey figured out. A boy, clever but still just a boy.
She skirted the edge of the hall, keeping to the shadows, moving toward the far side of the abbey.
She was so focused on the trap she could see, that she missed the one she could not.
Her boot snagged the thin, almost invisible tripwire.
SWISH!
The sound of the crossbow firing was a sudden, violent cough in the dead silence.
Lysandra moved with a speed that was not human.
She twisted, her body a blur of silver and black, her swords coming up in a defensive arc. She did not have to. The quarrel was never aimed at her.
It slammed into the stone wall a foot from her head, the iron tip striking sparks before it clattered to the floor.
THWACK!
The impact echoed through the vast, silent space.
Lysandra froze, her back now to the wall, her swords held ready. The smirk was gone from her face.
Her heart was hammering in her chest.
The pain in her arm, where she had scraped it against the stone in her hurried dodge, was insignificant.
The message was not.
From the darkness above, Adrian watched.
He saw her reaction. The shock. The realization. The way her eyes now scanned the shadows not for a clumsy boy, but for an equal.
The arrow was not a weapon. It was a word.
And that word was, Welcome.
He felt a grudging, hateful respect. She had not fallen for his trap. But he had landed the first blow.
This was not Tiberius. This was not Valerius.
This was a hunt.
And he could not wait to see how it ended.