Slave Hunt Read online

  Riptide Publishing

  PO Box 1537

  Burnsville, NC 28714

  www.riptidepublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. All person(s) depicted on the cover are model(s) used for illustrative purposes only.

  Slave Hunt

  Copyright © 2016 by J.A. Rock

  Cover art: Kanaxa, kanaxa.com

  Editor: Delphine Dryden, delphinedryden.com/editing

  Layout: L.C. Chase, lcchase.com/design.htm

  Interior illustrations: J.A. Rock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher, and where permitted by law. Reviewers may quote brief passages in a review. To request permission and all other inquiries, contact Riptide Publishing at the mailing address above, at Riptidepublishing.com, or at [email protected].

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-427-5

  First edition

  October, 2016

  Also available in paperback:

  ISBN: 978-1-62649-470-1

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  Thirty people. Two hours. Only the strong will survive.

  When Riddle decides to put on a slave hunt, the Subs Club is on board. Tops hunting bottoms in the woods with paintball guns? Yes. Captives strung up on whipping posts, at the mercy of their captors? Hell yes. But on the morning of the hunt, nothing’s going according to plan. Miles and Drix are at odds over Miles’s reluctance to move in together. Dave is determined to show up D, who thinks Dave won’t last two minutes in the woods. Gould finds himself torn between obeying his master’s orders and living out a longtime fantasy. And Kamen inadvertently becomes a double agent when he aligns himself with two different parties.

  By the end of the hunt, alliances will be forged and broken, loyalties will be tested, relationships will be strengthened . . . and someone will barrel roll. Narrated by ten different characters, Slave Hunt tells the story of two hours in the woods that will change everyone forever. Or at least, remind them that love is the greatest victory of all.

  About Slave Hunt

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  Also by J.A. Rock

  About the Author

  More like this

  When I woke up, there was a Hemsworth sitting on my face.

  Don’t ask me how long I’ve wanted to say that.

  Okay, it wasn’t Liam or Chris or even Luke—it was my dog, who’s an Italian greyhound mixed with a Chinese crested and is seriously weird as shit. He has these nightmares where he shakes and makes little murfing noises and then wakes up suddenly and climbs on my head. Ryan was usually like, Ignore him and maybe he’ll nut up, but I couldn’t ignore Hemsworth. I always picked him up and sang him his favorite songs, which were “Amanda” by Boston—because Hemsworth was big into Ryan’s friend Amanda—and “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

  Anyway, I pulled Hemsworth off my face and held him up like The Lion King. His back legs kicked. Then I pulled him down against my chest and hugged that little fucker.

  Speaking of little fuckers . . .

  Ryan stretched beside me and stuffed his hand under the pillow. I’m not even shitting about him being little, because he’s the shortest guy I’ve literally ever seen in person. He’s real self-conscious about it, and I’m like . . . I can’t even think of enough ways to tell him how much I love how tiny he is. He’s like a friggin’ haunty-faced ghost child, but also all man, because you should see him dom me. One time last month, he was yelling at the power company on the phone, and Hemsworth peed on the floor from the power of Ryan’s voice, and I basically did too, metaphorically.

  I set Hemsworth on my other side and rolled to face Ryan. Then I stared at him and loved him with my eye lasers.

  Ryan’s the kind of guy, you see him, and you want to hold him with your whole soul, and then you wish your soul was a robot with the world’s most powerful robot arms so it could hold him even harder. But I made do with my regular arms.

  He grunted, and after a minute he started pushing at my chest, which is his signal that he’s running out of air, so I let him go.

  He smiled at me, and I smiled back, and then suddenly his smile disappeared, and mine did too. ’Cause pretty sure we’d both just remembered we were enemies today.

  Not enemies, really.

  But today . . . today was the slave hunt.

  I hadn’t even known what a slave hunt was when we all got the email from Riddle. By “we all,” I mean me and Ryan, plus my best friends, Dave, Miles, and Gould, plus their partners, D, Drix, GK, and Kel. I mean, I guess GK and Kel didn’t actually get the email, since they were the ones who sent it. They own Riddle, which was the only official BDSM dungeon in our city since Cobalt had closed.

  Anyway, they’d decided to put on this slave hunt, which was basically where you went to a giant wooded property—in this case, some land D owned outside the city—and if you were a sub or bottom, you got hunted, and if you were a dom or a top, you got a paintball gun and you hunted the subs and bottoms. And the subs and bottoms were all called slaves for hunt purposes, even if they weren’t actual slaves. If you got shot, you had to go with your captor to the whipping posts, where you’d get tied up and the hunters could do stuff to you.

  Like, stuff.

  “Do you have my cards for the whipping post?” I asked Ryan a while later. I’d just gotten out of the shower, and he was making me breakfast, even though dude was about to hunt me. We could never be enemies—even fake enemies.

  “They’re over on the table.”

  Every slave had cards that got tacked up on the whipping posts, telling the hunters what
the slave’s limits were.

  I dropped my towel and walked to the table to look over them again. You could say on your card which hunters were allowed to play with you. You could even say that you didn’t want anyone to touch you except your own partner. Ry and me had decided that anyone could do stuff with me, but there were some rules.

  NO MARKS

  NO SERIOUS PAIN

  NO BUTT STUFF

  NO CBT

  LIGHT SPANKING, HOSING, DISPLAY POSITIONING OK. CAN T&D USING PROVIDED SLEEVE.

  SAFEWORD IS WINGS.

  I glanced up. “How come you didn’t put they can make me wear panties?”

  He flipped a pancake. “I didn’t know you wanted to wear panties somewhere that public.”

  I set the cards down and bent to pet Hemsworth, who was pacing by my feet. He stretched his neck to sniff the air around my balls. I’d been working on teaching him that smelling my junk was inapprops, so I straightened up and looked at Ryan again. “I told you the other night that my body was ready.”

  “Did you tell me in the form of a song?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Was I not listening to the song because I was trying to watch Jeopardy?”

  “Maybe.” He hated when I played my guitar while he was trying to watch TV, which was why I had to do it.

  I walked over to the stove. Leaned on my elbows on the counter beside him. “It was a good song.”

  “I’m sure it was.” He smacked my butt with the spatula. “Go put panties on, then. Don’t let me see which ones.”

  I stared at him a few secs longer. His hair was all kinda pushed in and sleep-greasy around his ear, because he hadn’t showered yet. That was my favorite kind of moment, when people you loved were just being people, with their morning breath and bad hair and stubble or whatever. He glanced over at me again, then reached out and scratched my back.

  “Yes.” I pressed against his tiny shoulder as he scratched. “Yes, you are the god of everything.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Lower, please . . . lower . . . oh my God. Oh my God, show me a hero. Oh, look, there’s one right here.”

  He laughed and scratched harder.

  Ryan didn’t mind that I was kinda dumb. I mostly didn’t mind either, except on days like today, where I needed to be conniving. I felt like I’d do okay in the hunt, though. I wasn’t exactly stealthy, but I was athletic. And Dave and I had formed a secret alliance, so he could be the brains, and I could be the guy who, like, armed us with branch spears so we could fight the hunters when they found us.

  Ryan stopped scratching and patted me. “Pancakes are almost done.”

  “You should use a new spatch.”

  He changed spatulas and put my butt-germ one in the sink. “I can’t wait to see you up there in your panties.”

  “If I get caught.”

  “You’ll get caught. And then I want to play with you in your panties in front of everyone.”

  First-class passengers were now boarding the train to Bonertown. “Do it.”

  “You know what the problem’ll be?”

  “Huh?”

  “If someone else catches you. And I’m still in the woods while you’re on the whipping post.”

  Captured slaves had to spend half an hour on the posts. The hunt lasted two hours, and hunters could come and go from the main camp area. Like, you could hang out in camp and mess around with the slaves, then go back in the woods and hunt some more. So if I got caught and Ryan didn’t know about it, and he was in the woods, my stint on the posts could be over before he got back to camp.

  I shifted. “You’ve just gotta, like, keep checking camp to see if I’ve been captured yet.”

  He nodded and looked up. “Or . . . we could form an alliance. Meet in a certain place so that I’m definitely the one who captures you.”

  I froze. ’Cause I already had an alliance with Dave. But I couldn’t tell Ryan that. “Uh . . .”

  “Unless you’re playing to win. That’s totally fine.”

  “I’m just worried people would know we’re in cahoots. Like, they’ll think we just used this as an excuse to play together on the whipping posts.”

  “Who cares what they think?” he asked, kinda loud.

  “Shouty caps,” I reminded him. Sometimes he did the talking equivalent of typing in all caps, and I had to check him, ’cause he had a sort of cartoon voice that alarmed people when it was loud. He also typed in literal shouty caps, which was adorbzible, but I always wondered how far that extended. Like, did he type official paralegal stuff in all caps? ’Cause that would be kind of weird. But maybe it helped him have a recognizable style at his job, like how when you look at a van Gogh painting, you know it was the Gogh-ster who painted it because of all the swirlies.

  He dialed it down a notch. “Well, I could go after a couple of other slaves first, to show I’m serious about winning. And then meet you somewhere in the woods.”

  That could work. We’d used D’s property a while back to practice pony play stuff. We hadn’t really explored the woods back then—just the meadow. But we knew the lay of the land, so to speak.

  I didn’t want to refuse Ryan, because he was the greatest human and I wanted him to grope me in my lace panties while I was tied to the whipping post and then, like, yank my panties down and tongue-slap my fartbox in front of everyone. But also I didn’t want to betray Dave.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.” I said a silent apology to Dave.

  “Excellent.” He used the spatula to flop my dick up and down. He hadn’t even touched the pancakes with it yet. Dude was pretty wasteful when it came to spatulas.

  He switched from the spatula to his hand for dick-flopping, and second-class passengers boarded the Bonertown Express, and then the train pulled out of the station. I spread my legs, bracing myself on the counter so he could get all up in there.

  Ryan and I were basically hypersexual. There was literally no limit to the amount of time I’d be willing to spend fucking this dude. One time, we called a radio sexpert to ask if it was normal, and she said it sounded like we had an addiction. But if wanting my amazing, tiny, ghost-child, boss-ass boyfriend inside me every moment of the day was wrong, then I didn’t want to be right.

  He quit before I topped those pancakes with some motherfucking whipped cream, and told me to get the OJ.

  I also got him a new spatula, and he threw the dick-germ one in the sink. I picked Count Spatula, which was the world’s greatest spatch, ’cause it was shaped like a purple Dracula head, and when you pressed a button on the handle, it laughed like muah ha haaaa.

  I pressed the button as I brought it to him. He reached to take it, but I pressed the button again.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s enough.”

  I pressed it again, because he knew he loved it. He yanked it out of my hand and pretty much beat the crap out of my shoulders with it until I ran away. I decided it was okay for him to keep using it for pancakes, because shoulders don’t have as many germs as butts or dicks.

  I went to the fridge and started thinking about how I was gonna pull off this double-agent business.

  I stood in the doorway to the Den of Horrors, my mouth hanging open. I’d seen some terrifying shit in this room—I mean shit that would make a Will Graham hallucination look like a vision of goddamn sugarplums—but this took the cake.

  “Are you sharpening a knife?”

  D kept his gaze on the knife and the sharpener. “Yes.”

  “For what?” I stepped into the room, glancing at the wall rack covered in spanking implements behind him. “For the hunt?”

  He took the knife off the sharpener and turned it over, studying it. Then he looked up at me, the blade glinting in his hand. “David. This is our steak knife. I’m not going to hunt you with it. I’m merely readying it for dinner.” D’s low, languid speech and overenunciation were usually eccentric and charming, but right now, with the knife clutched in his fist, and the row of paddles, straps, and canes behind him, that
monotone was chilling.

  “Are we having steak tonight?”

  He returned to sharpening. “I imagine I will require some sort of celebratory dinner.”

  I bristled at the implication that he would be the one with something to celebrate tonight.

  My boyfriend—and “boyfriend” sounded weird, because D was forty and weathered, while I was twenty-eight and could still fit into the pants of an eighteen-year-old, if I sucked in—was an odd duck at the best of times. He loved woodworking, hiking, knife sharpening, meat, and rocking a mustache that made Teddy Roosevelt look like a prepubescent teen with a few scraggly upper-lip hairs. And he pretended to be interested in things like my favorite reality show, Space Camp, and dress shirts that brought out my eyes, and the Subs Club. Because he loved me, even if it sounded like those words were being forced out of him through a bellows on the rare occasions he actually said them.

  But he’d been especially weird lately. This slave hunt was his absolute fantasy come true. All he had ever wanted in life was a chance to enact The Most Dangerous Game, and this was—hopefully—as close as he would get. I’d been checking in with him periodically over the past few months to make sure he realized he wasn’t actually allowed to slay the humans he caught.

  We’d had a lot of fun joking about the hunt, anticipating it together . . . until he’d happened to mention a few weeks ago that he didn’t think I stood a chance of winning.

  “What are you talking about?” I’d demanded. “You think I can’t outrun a bunch of mostly middle-aged tops?”

  He hadn’t looked up from the paddle he was varnishing. “It’s not a matter of outrunning, David. This is survival. It requires skill, patience, and discretion.”

  “I have all those things.” Okay, my only real skills were cutting hair and being a flamboyant asshole. Patience and I had never been on friendly terms, and discretion . . . no. Just no.

  He snorted.

  “You think you could hunt me in the woods and win?” I’d wanted to make sure I understood correctly.

  “David, I am not even going to bother hunting you in those woods. I intend to pursue more elusive prey. You will be caught by someone within minutes.”

  From that moment on, I’d been determined to beat him. To elude him and the other hunters until the hunt was over. Prove him fucking wrong.