A prey and his hunter

If you think I’m fucked up in the head, then you haven’t met Sebastian King.

The first time I officially met Sebastian King, he had just smashed someone’s skull open like a ripe watermelon against the concrete floor of an abandoned warehouse. Blood sprayed in a fine mist.

Bone cracked with a wet, final sound. And in that exact second—while everyone else flinched or looked away—I knew, without a single second of doubt, that he was meant to be mine. He just hasn’t realized it yet.

Now there are three problems.

First, I cannot be gay. Being the third and most unloved child is already bad enough. Being gay is basically loading the gun and handing it to my father. He would put a bullet between my eyes without blinking and then have someone clean up the mess before dinner.

Second, Sebastian hates my guts. We are supposed to be rivals—two families circling the same bloody territory, two names that make lesser men sweat. But isn’t hate sex the purest kind? All that violence with nowhere to go except inside each other.

Third, he is madly, unhealthily, obsessively in love with his ‘brother’ Fine. What’s sex without a little role-play? If he lets me, I can be his brother for the night. I can whisper the name he wants to hear while I ruin him.

*******

Every year my brothers and I host the same traditional hunting game. The rules are simple on paper and filthy in practice. You decide whether you want to hunt your prey down and kill them, or hunt them, restrain them, and take whatever you want from their body.

Okay—maybe the killing part is exaggerated. We don’t usually finish anyone off. The bodies would be too hard to explain, and the cleanup is tedious.

But the sex is very real.

It’s a sick, twisted game where both men and women pay a huge fortune just for the chance to be hunted. They sign waivers. They hand over the money.

They put on the masks and step into the woods knowing exactly what might happen to them. Some of them hope for violence. Some of them hope for something softer. Most of them hope for both.

“You want in this year?” I turned my attention to my eldest half-brother. Matteo was watching me with that quiet, assessing look he always wore—the same look that made people forget he could order a man erased with a single text.

I shook my head. I had never been interested in their particular brand of entertainment. That was probably one of the many reasons the others despised me.

Aside from Matteo, no one else ever bothered asking. He was the only one who still looked at me like I was family instead of a permanent stain. To the rest of them I was just the illegitimate child who survived on scraps of their father’s money.

It didn’t matter how many times I proved I was sharper, faster, and more useful than the three of them combined. They still hated me for existing.

My mother had been a paid companion who dumped her six-year-old son into a den of wolves the moment the money ran dry. My half-brothers blamed me for the wreckage of their parents’ marriage.

Even our father looked at me like I was living proof of his own carelessness. As if I had been the one who decided he should fuck around without a condom.

Maybe pull out next time if you don’t want some strange kid knocking on your door six years later.

“Let me know if you change your mind,” Matteo said, giving my shoulder a light pat. “You can always be honest with me.”

That was why he was the eldest and the heir. Sensible. Logical. Cold when he needed to be. If I had to rank us, Matteo was the brain. Luca was the weapon—pure violence with a pretty face. Leo was the hacker, the one who could make cameras lie and bank accounts disappear.

And me? I could do all three. I was the total package. The problem was that no one wanted the package when it came with my last name and my mother’s blood.

We stood on the elevated platform overlooking the gathering. The “victims”—as we liked to call them—bubbled with nervous excitement while they collected their identical black masks and the heavy coins that would decide how far a hunter could go.

More coins meant more money at the end of the night. Not that anyone here truly needed the cash. Most of them were richer than god. Most of them were richer than me.

Unlike my spoiled brothers, I didn’t get a monthly allowance. My mother had run off with more than enough, so Father made sure I earned every single cent.

Want a million? Complete three high-risk assignments without fucking up. Fail one and you get nothing. Bleed for it or starve. That was the deal.

Everyone who signed up received the same mask—except one.

My eyes scanned the crowd until they locked onto a tall figure near the edge of the clearing. He moved differently from the others. Less eager. More controlled.

He looked around once, curious but not nervous, then pulled a completely different mask from inside his jacket.

Strange. I’d seen that posture somewhere before. “Do we give out different masks now?” I asked Matteo, never taking my eyes off the stranger.

“No,” Matteo answered, already typing something on his phone. “They’re all the same.”

Interesting.

If there was one thing I loved more than anything, it was trouble. Catching troublemakers earned me praise and money from my father. God forbid I ever got touch, love, or anything soft. I could starve for those things and no one would notice.

They might hate me, but sometimes—late at night, when the house was quiet—I still wished I had what they had. “I think I’ll join this year,” I said.

Matteo glanced up, mildly surprised. “Alright. Grab a mask and hunt.”

*****

I may have cheated—just a little.

A quick pull of the CCTV feeds told me exactly which path the man in the strange mask had taken. What was more interesting was how carefully he moved. He knew where every camera was. He avoided the good angles like a man who had done this before. That only made me want him more.

I followed at a distance, letting the dark swallow me. “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I sang under my breath, circling the massive oak he was trying to disappear behind. His breathing was far too loud for someone who actually wanted to stay hidden.

“I can hear you,” I whispered.

Then I lunged.

My hand closed around the front of his shirt and I yanked hard. We both lost balance, We hit the dirt in a tangle of limbs, me on top of him, knees already bracketing his thighs. He fought immediately—twisting, shoving, trying to throw me off—but I was heavier and already settling my full weight across his hips.

He kept struggling even pinned beneath me. Every sharp movement only pressed us closer. I shifted, forcing his wrists down into the soft earth, and then a small, involuntary gasp slipped out of him.

His hips jerked upward once.

I went still.

Slowly, deliberately, I ground down against the unmistakable ridge of his cock. Another broken sound tore from behind the mask. The fabric of our clothes was the only thing between us, and it wasn’t doing much to hide how hard he already was.

“Interesting,” I murmured, voice low and almost amused. “Does someone enjoy being hunted? Did you pay over a million just so someone would do this to you?”

I rocked my hips again. The friction dragged a wrecked little noise out of him. His chest rose and fell too fast. Through the thin material of his pants I could feel every thick inch of him, already leaking enough that the fabric was starting to dampen.

I did it again. And again. Building a rhythm that was pure punishment. Dry-humping him into the dirt like I had all the time in the world and zero intention of letting him come easy. His body answered even when his pride tried not to. Hips lifting to meet every grind. Thighs trembling. Fingers clawing at the soil beside his head.

“Fuck—look at you,” I whispered against the edge of the mask. He made a sound that might have been a curse or a plea. I couldn’t tell.

I didn’t care. I rolled my hips harder, dragging my own growing hardness against his, chasing the heat and the friction until both of us were panting. Then his hand shot up.

He grabbed my wrist—hard—and dragged my hand to his throat.

I froze for half a second, startled by the clear demand. His fingers pressed mine tighter against the column of his neck, showing me exactly how much pressure he wanted. A dark, vicious thrill tore through me. Ohh, love that for me. A sick fuck like me? Sign me up!

I squeezed hard.

Not enough to cut him off completely, just enough to make every breath a fight. His cock jerked hard against mine. A wrecked, choked moan ripped out of him.

I ground down harder, choking him in time with every filthy roll of my hips, watching the way his body arched and shuddered like he was being electrocuted by the pleasure.

“That’s it,” I rasped. “Take it.”

His hips snapped up wildly, twice. Then he broke.

He came with a strangled, ruined sound, body seizing under mine, cock pulsing wet and hot inside his pants while I kept the pressure on his throat and kept grinding him through it. The wet heat of his orgasm soaked through the material and smeared against me.

I didn’t stop moving until the last tremor left him and he went boneless in the dirt, gasping for air the second I loosened my grip.

We lay there for a long moment, both breathing hard. The forest felt too quiet. My own cock was aching, ignored, but I didn’t care. I needed to see the face of the man who had just come apart under me like that.

I ripped the mask off before he could protest.

A loud, stunned gasp tore out of my own throat.

“It’s you?!”

Sebastian King stared up at me, pupils blown, lips parted, cheeks flushed dark with the aftermath of what we had just done. Sweat dampened the hair at his temples. His throat still carried the faint red imprint of my hand.

And that was a year ago. Now tell me what the fuck was Sebastian doing in our hunting game again this year?

NOTE: THIS IS BOOK TWO OF THE KINGS SERIES, IT IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED TO READ THE FIRST BOOK (You're mine, brother) You can check my profile for it. But this can also be read as a standalone. ENJOY!