The Lottery Of Haven

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Chapter One:

She should never have gone so far from the cabin.

The thought hit her again and again as she tore through the woods, branches whipping at her face, mud dragging at her boots, rain sliding cold beneath the collar of her coat. She had been stupid. Reckless. So desperate to feel the open air beyond the trees that she had wandered too far from the one place she had promised herself she would never leave unguarded.

Her safe haven was behind her now, hidden somewhere in the dark, and she could not see the path back.

Footsteps crashed through the undergrowth behind her. Not one set. Several. Heavy, uneven, spreading through the trees as if they meant to surround her. Every snap of a twig sent panic spearing through her chest, but she forced her legs to move faster, harder, ignoring the burn in her lungs and the stitch tearing at her side.

Do not stop.

She did not know whether the words were a prayer or a command. Her heart hammered so violently she could feel it in her throat. The trees blurred around her, black trunks and silver rain and jagged shadows, but she kept running because fear had stripped everything else away. There was no plan now. No careful route. No quiet return to safety.

There was only the sound of them behind her, getting closer.

Then came the voices. Male voices, low and breathless, cutting through the rain in broken shouts she could not quite make out. One of them laughed, sharp and cruel, and the sound sent a fresh burst of terror through her legs. They were close enough now that she could hear the scrape of their boots, the snap of branches as they pushed harder through the trees. Close enough to know they had not lost her.

She risked a glance over her shoulder and nearly lost her footing. The woods behind her were a blur of darkness and movement, shapes breaking apart in the sheets of rain before she could make sense of them. The downpour was so thick it seemed to hang between the trees like a curtain, drumming against the leaves, drowning the ground, turning every shadow into a threat. She could barely see a few feet in front of her, let alone where she was going, but stopping would be worse. Stopping would mean they had her.

If they caught her, she knew it would not end with a warning or a shove back towards the cabin. Men did not chase women through woods in storms because they meant to be kind. Not these days. Not when every road, every empty field, every stretch of darkness belonged more to them than it ever had to her. Being a woman alone had become its own kind of danger, something she carried under her skin every time she stepped outside, and that was what made her stupidity burn so hot beneath the panic. She had known better. She had known the rules. Stay hidden. Stay quiet. Stay close to the cabin. But she had not been outside in weeks, not properly, not with the sky open above her and the air on her face, and when the rain began she had wanted to feel it. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to remember she was still alive.

If they caught her, she would not make it easy. The thought came sharp and fierce through the panic, cutting through the part of her that wanted to collapse and beg the night to swallow her whole. She would kick. Bite. Scratch. Aim for eyes, throats, knees—every weak place her father had drilled into her before sickness had stripped him down to bone and breath. He had made her practise until her knuckles split, until she hated him for pushing her, then loved him for it later, when the world proved him right. Fight dirty, he used to say. Fight like surviving is the only decent thing left. And then he had died anyway, leaving her alone in this fucked-up world with nothing but his lessons and the stubborn, burning promise that she would not go quietly.

For half a second, she was back in the clearing behind the old house, thirteen years old with rain in her eyes and her father’s hands wrapped around her wrists. “Again,” he had said, voice rough but steady, even as the cough rattled deep in his chest. She had been crying then, furious and embarrassed, mud on her knees and blood on her lip. “I can’t.” “You can,” he had told her, forcing her to meet his eyes. “Because one day I might not be here, and you will still have to get up.”

The memory hit so hard she missed the root jutting from the ground.

Her boot caught. Her body pitched forward before she could throw out her hands, and she went flying, shoulder first, into the wet dirt. Mud slapped against her cheek. The breath burst from her lungs. For one terrible second she lay there stunned, rain hammering her back as the footsteps behind her grew louder. Closer. Boots thudded through the mud, fast and heavy, crushing leaves, snapping twigs, splashing through puddles. One set veered to her left. Another crashed somewhere to her right. They were spreading out again, closing the distance while she was still on the ground.

“She went this way!” one of them shouted, his voice jagged through the rain. “I heard her fall.” Another voice answered from deeper in the trees, closer than it should have been. “Spread out. She can’t have got far.” Emma pressed her mouth shut against the gasp clawing up her throat and forced herself not to move. Mud seeped into her sleeves. Rain ran into her eyes. She could not see them through the dark and the downpour, so they could not see her. That was what she told herself. If she could not see them, they could not see her.

For a moment, it worked. The voices shifted farther away, swallowed bit by bit by the storm and the trees until they were only rough shapes in the distance. Emma stayed where she was, cheek pressed to the mud, waiting for the coast to clear, waiting until she was certain the footsteps had moved on. Rain pelted down against her back with bruising force, plastering her clothes to her skin until every layer clung heavy and freezing. Her teeth wanted to chatter, but she locked her jaw shut and counted her breaths in the dark. One. Two. Three. Maybe she was safe. Maybe they had passed her. Maybe, if she just waited a little longer, she could crawl away and find the cabin again.

Then a hand closed in her hair.

Emma screamed as her head was yanked back and her body was dragged up from the mud, pain tearing across her scalp as the dark woods spun around her.

“Found you,” a man breathed close to her ear.

His fist tightened in her hair as he hauled her backwards through the mud, ignoring the way she clawed at his wrist and kicked for purchase against the slick ground. Emma’s boots skidded beneath her. Branches scraped her legs. Rain blurred everything into streaks of black and silver, and through it she could only make out the shapes of men gathering between the trees, broad shoulders and raised arms and pale faces flashing whenever lightning cracked above them.

“Well, look at that,” one of them said, stepping closer. “You gave us quite the chase, girl.”

Another laughed from somewhere to her right. “Thought you were clever, did you? Hiding in the dirt like a little rabbit.”

Emma blinked hard against the rain, trying to count them, trying to find a gap, a direction, anything. But the storm made monsters of their outlines. One shape became two. Two became shadows. The flashlights swung between them, cutting across her face and the wet ground, leaving her half-blind each time the beams moved away.

“Easy now,” the man holding her hair said, though there was nothing gentle in his grip. “No more running.”

“We should take her back,” another man said, and for the first time there was uncertainty in one of their voices. “You know the rules. Boss won’t like it if we touch her.”

The man holding her hair gave a short, ugly laugh. “Shut up and grow some balls.”

Emma went still in his grip, colder now than the rain could make her, as the others shifted around them. She could not see their faces properly, only the dark shapes of them through the storm, but she could feel the mood changing. It moved between them like a spark finding dry grass.

“We haven’t touched a woman in years,” he said, his voice thick with bitterness. “We’ve been waiting for our chance with the lottery like everyone else, waiting and waiting while the boss hands out scraps and promises.”

“That doesn’t mean—”

“Why can’t it be our turn?” the man snapped. His grip jerked Emma’s head back, forcing a cry from her throat. “We found her. Finders keepers and all that.”

Lottery?

The word snagged in Emma’s mind, strange and horrifying, impossible to fit with the rain and the mud and the hand twisted in her hair. What lottery? What rules? What had they been waiting for? Around her, the men chuckled, low and hungry, as if she was already something decided between them.

No.

The word snapped through her like a blade. Not like this. Not standing still. Not waiting for them to decide what happened next. Her father’s voice roared up through the storm, rough and certain. Fight dirty. Fight like surviving is the only decent thing left.

Emma threw her head back with everything she had.

There was a sickening crack as the back of her skull smashed into the man’s nose. He shouted, grip loosening in her hair, and she used the opening without thinking. She drove her knee up hard between his legs.

He folded with a strangled sound, and Emma tore free.

She ran blind, shoulder-first through the nearest gap in the circle, but hands caught her almost immediately. Another man seized her from the side, arms clamping around her ribs and yanking her back against his chest.

“Fierce little thing, aren’t you?” he grunted near her ear.

Emma slammed her heel down onto his foot, then snapped her elbow back into his stomach. When his hold loosened, she twisted hard, just the way her father had taught her, slipping one arm free and driving the heel of her palm up beneath his chin.

The man’s head snapped back, and for one brief, blazing second the circle around her broke. The laughter died first, cut off as if someone had put a hand over every mouth. Then came the swearing. The man she had kneed was still on the ground, curled into himself and groaning through blood running from his nose. The one she had struck staggered back, clutching his jaw, eyes wide with shock before anger rushed in to replace it.

“You little bitch,” someone hissed.

The words moved through them like a match dropped into oil. Their amusement vanished. Shoulders squared. Emma saw the mistake at the same moment they did: she had hurt them, but she had also reminded them she was not helpless. That made them angrier. More dangerous.

Emma saw the gap and took it.

She lunged between two of them, slipping on the mud but forcing herself forward anyway, every instinct screaming for the trees, for darkness, for any chance at distance. She made it three steps before a figure stepped out from the tree line directly in front of her.

A hand caught her wrist with brutal ease.

“Not so fast, darling.”

The voice was calm. Too calm. Not breathless like the others, not rough with the chase. Emma twisted hard, trying to wrench herself free, but his fingers locked around her like iron. He turned her back towards the group, and the men who had been closing in suddenly went still.

“Boss,” one of them said.

The word moved through them faster than the lightning. Shoulders dropped. Eyes slid away. Even through the rain, Emma could feel the shift from anger to concern, the sudden awareness that they had been caught doing something they were not supposed to do.

“What are you doing out here?” one of the men asked, trying and failing to sound casual.

The man holding Emma did not look at him. “My men had been gone from Haven for a while,” he said. “Long enough for me to become concerned. So I came looking.”

His grip tightened when Emma tried again to twist free. She dug her heels into the mud and jerked her arm back, but he barely moved.

“Imagine my surprise,” he continued, his tone sharpening at last, “when I find all of you gathered around a single female in the middle of the woods, in the middle of a storm, when every one of you knows the rules if you come across one.”

“We were bringing her back to Haven,” one of the men said quickly. “That’s all. We were just—”

“With a bloody nose?” the boss cut in.

No one answered. Rain beat down between them, loud enough to fill the silence and not loud enough to hide the fear beginning to show on their faces.

“She attacked first,” the man with the bloody nose muttered, though the words came thick and wet. “We were only trying to keep hold of her.”

“Keep hold of her?” another man snapped under his breath. “You were the one talking about finders keepers.”

“Shut your mouth,” the first man said, but the force had gone out of him now. He kept one hand cupped under his nose and would not look directly at the boss. “You were laughing same as the rest of us.”

“Nobody touched her,” a third man said quickly. “Not properly. We remembered the rules.”

The boss’s silence made that lie shrivel in the rain.

“We were going to bring her in,” the uncertain one said again, quieter this time. “That’s what we’re supposed to do. Straight back to Haven. No claims. No games.”

Emma twisted again, harder this time, throwing her weight backwards and trying to break his hold the way her father had shown her. The boss only shifted his stance, dragged her closer, and pinned her arm against her side with effortless control.

“I’ll deal with all of you later,” the boss said, and the quiet promise in his voice made the men shift uneasily.

Then he turned Emma around to face him.

The woods were still dark around them, but the rain had begun to ease, thinning from a violent sheet into a cold, steady fall. Shapes sharpened at the edges. The men became less like monsters and more like men, which somehow made them worse.

The boss studied her through the fading storm. “It has been a while since a lottery was announced,” he said. “Your arrival is going to cause quite a stir.”

Emma’s stomach dropped, but fear only made the fire in her burn hotter. She twisted sharply, managing to wrench one arm free.

She punched him as hard as she could.

Her fist cracked against his face, snapping his head slightly to the side. For one breath, satisfaction flashed through her, bright and wild. Then he turned back.

He was still holding her.

The boss chuckled, low and almost impressed. “That was a mistake, darling.”

Something hard struck the back of Emma’s head.

The world lurched. The trees tilted. For a second she saw rain hanging in the air like silver thread.

Then everything went black.