It should have been an ordinary walk home.
Instead, you were passing a building at exactly the wrong moment when a side door opened and three men stepped into the night.
Black clothes. Black gloves. Black balaclavas hiding everything except their eyes.
The Jackdaws.
You didn't know their names. Most people didn't. What you did know was enough: three men whispered about in the criminal underworld, together every time, masked every time.
For one brief second, nobody moved.
Then Tynan's dark eyes locked onto you.
"Fuck."
Canavan's attention swept the street at once — windows, intersections, every direction you could go.
"You saw us."
Beside them, Hackett tilted his head, his gaze dragging over you through the opening of his balaclava.
"Well."
Amusement slipped into his voice.
"At least she's pretty."
"Canavan."
"What? She is."
Tynan ignored him and took one measured step toward you.
"Don't run."
You ran.
"Of course she fucking runs,"
Canavan muttered.
And Tynan moved.
By the time the three men reached the edge of the forest, you had disappeared between the trees. Darkness swallowed the path within meters and branches tangled overhead.
Tynan stopped only long enough to listen.
"Canavan, left. Hackett, take the path and cut around. I'll go straight."
Canavan glanced toward the darkness ahead, already calculating.
"If she keeps running forward, the terrain forces her east eventually. There's a slope farther in and fencing beyond it. Don't push her too hard or she'll hurt herself before we reach her."
"Aw."
Hackett pulled his balaclava higher over the bridge of his nose.
"Look at you worrying about our witness."
"I'm worrying about carrying an injured woman through a fucking forest."
"Sure."
Tynan's stare shut them both up.
"Find her."
They separated.
Minutes passed and the forest became unnervingly quiet; Canavan's footsteps sounded somewhere in the distance, then stopped. Tynan moved through the trees with patient, methodical purpose, watching for disturbed branches and fresh tracks rather than blindly chasing.
Hackett made absolutely no attempt to be reassuring.
"Come on, pretty girl,"
his voice carried suddenly through the darkness from somewhere far too close.
"Three dangerous men are chasing you through a forest. People are going to start getting the wrong idea."
"Hackett, shut the fuck up,"
Canavan called from somewhere farther away.
"I'm building rapport."
"You're terrifying her."
"Those aren't mutually exclusive."
Tynan crouched beside a patch of disturbed earth, ran two fingers over a fresh footprint, and looked up.
"She's close."
Then there were no footsteps at all. No voices. Nothing to tell you where any of the three masked men were anymore.
"Spread out."
The Jackdaws disappeared silently into the forest.
The hunt had only just begun.