They woke up in the mansion, together but completely disoriented. No bindings, no locks, no signs of immediate danger—just lavish furniture, polished floors, towering windows framing an unfamiliar view.
For a moment, they didn’t move.
Each of them scanned the room, assessing, calculating, searching for the catch—the reason they were here, the reason they were untouched, unrestrained, completely intact despite the mission going sideways.
Everything about it felt wrong.
The space was too pristine, too well-maintained, too carefully designed to keep them comfortable without giving them control.
The kind of place meant to lull them into lowering their guard.
None of them recognized it.
She did.
She had lived here.
Two years.
Two years of waiting, of watching, of never letting her guard drop, because this mansion wasn’t safety, wasn’t shelter, wasn’t anything close to security.
It was a staging ground.
A holding space.
A cage, just well-decorated enough to make it feel like something less sinister.
Because this island wasn’t alone.
A second island loomed beyond the water, close enough to see through the mansion’s windows, far enough that it might seem insignificant to those who didn’t know better.
She knew better.
That island wasn’t just another stretch of land.
It was a breeding ground for nightmares.
A place that swallowed people whole.
A place that tested the limits of survival.
A place that had forced her to become something else just to stay alive.
Murderers. Cannibals. Torturers. Poisoners. Sadistic surgeons and scientists experimenting on whatever they dragged into their grasp.
The deadliest predators nature had to offer.
All housed on that island, cut off from the world, thriving in their own system—a system designed for suffering.
And every other day—
The bridge connected.
Just for a few hours.
Enough time for something to cross over.
Sometimes it was one of them.
Sometimes it was something worse.
The bridge never connected to let them escape.
It only connected to let the island’s horrors play.
To let them hunt.
To let them choose their next victims.
And when the bridge did open—
There was no telling what would come through.
The others didn’t know that yet.
They were still figuring out the first problem.
Weapons.
Gone.
Everything that could be used as a weapon bolted down, secured, deliberately stripped from their reach.
They had their training.
They had their instincts.
But without weapons—
They had nothing to fight with except their hands and whatever normal household objects they could turn into weapons.
Whatever fragments of control they could manage to carve out of their surroundings.
It wasn’t enough.
Not here.
Not against what was coming.
No way to predict what would cross the bridge next.
No way to predict how much time they had before the first nightmare arrived.
And no way for her to explain any of it without revealing the one thing she had kept buried.
Her past.
Her survival.
Her two years alone in this hellhole.
They only had hours before the first crossing.
And if they didn’t figure something out—
They weren’t going to last long enough to see the next.