“I say we tell those other fuckers Cassie is ours,” I said.
We hadn’t talked about marking Cassie as our prey. We hadn’t had to talk about it. We’d taken one look at her, a curvaceous little redhead with big green eyes, tits that didn’t quit, and a mouth that was made for kissing — and sucking — and we’d known she was ours.
And since we ran the Hunt, that gave us first dibs.
Hawk slid his knife into the sheath at his waist and cracked his neck. “Defeats the purpose of the Hunt.”
“What if someone else gets to her first?” I asked, still bouncing.
“They won’t,” Hawk said.
Everything was that simple for Hawk. He decided something was going to happen and that was that.
But life was more chaotic than that — if you did it right anyway — which was what made it so much fucking fun.
Except now that I’d laid eyes on Cassie Montgomery I was feeling a little territorial. I could already see her strung up by the chains in the tunnels, stripped naked, helpless to stop us from playing with her like a new toy.
My dick got hard just thinking about it, and it didn’t help when my imagination turned to taking her home after the Hunt, trying out all the toys from our playroom on her luscious body.
And yeah, I’m not going to lie, it was a little more fun to think about because she was Bram’s little sister. We didn’t get a lot of opportunities to fuck with Bram and keep our heads, especially now that the Butchers were out of the Hunt for good.
Bram would be pissed, but the Hunt was the Hunt. Any girl could join, and once she signed the consent form, she was fair game.
It wasn’t our job to keep Bram’s little sister in line.
I glanced at Jagger as the clock neared the five-minute mark. I wasn’t surprised by his placid expression. Jagger was good at keeping his cool on the outside — once upon a time, it had been necessary for his job — but I could tell from the shine in his blue eyes that he was as eager to start the Hunt as Hawk and me.
We hadn’t grown up together, but we’d known each other for over five years. We worked together — if you wanted to call what we did for a living work — and lived together and fucked together.
They knew me better than anyone, accepted me better than anyone, and I wondered what the stuffed shirts at the university where I used to teach English would think of me now, shirtless and armed with a knife, eager to strip a girl naked, chain her to the stone walls, bury my face between her thighs.
The other teams were eager too, and I cut a glance at the Bulls, wondering what they’d be like in the tunnels. We’d beenhesitant to let in a new team — especially on our first round running it — but with the Ghosts gone and the Butchers out, the field had been looking a little sparse. Competition was part of the fun, and we’d been ready for more of it.
Which didn’t mean I was sold. The Bulls had gone through the same vetting process as the rest of us, background check included — we didn’t let anyone with rape or other assault charges against women into the Hunt because we weren’t fucking stupid — but knowing they weren’t serial killers wasn’t the same thing as knowing how they’d behave in the Hunt.
Every team had their own set of preferences, their own way of hunting. The Bulls knew the rules. As long as they followed them, anything went.
“Almost time,” Jagger said.
I watched the clock.
Ten seconds… nine…
How far had Cassie gotten in the last five minutes? How long would it take us to find her?
Four… three… two…
One.
We bounded into the tunnel, the other teams behind us as we ran. Hawk let out a war cry when we entered the darkness, and Jagger and I followed suit. We’d never talked about the way we hunted. Like everything we did together, it had just happened, a byproduct of finding the people who really understood you.
We hunted like we did everything else: full speed and without inhibition.
We’d all been constrained in our previous lives. Now we lived free and fuck anyone who tried to tame us.
We didn’t have a strategy. But we knew the tunnels better than any of the teams behind us, and somewhere, our prey ran scared while we hunted.
It was only a matter of time before we found her. Before we marked her.
