Page 95 of Hollow

“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 positionhim 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 ornatecorner. 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.”

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