Hunter

by Emmy Chandler

  And suddenly I can’t wait to wield it.

  I brace one hand on his thigh, then lean down and take the head of his cock into my mouth. It’s a strange sensation. He’s bigger than I really know what to do with, so at first I just lick the tip. That bead of moisture has a salty, musky taste, different than anything I’ve ever experienced.

  Callum groans again, and emboldened, I take in more of him and suck gently as I let him slide out of my mouth.

  “Oh my god.”

  I think that’s good. So, I do it again, taking him as deeply as I can. The head of his cock bumps against the back of my throat, and I stop for a second, to wrestle control of my gag reflex. It takes some getting used to, but soon I find a rhythm, stroking with both my hand and my mouth.

  Callum’s fingers slide into my hair at the back of my skull, not pushing me, but encouraging. His other hand clenches in the sheet, and the sight of it—of his eager arousal—makes me feel wet and achy, in the most delicious way.

  “Maci,” he murmurs, and a tremor runs through his body, as if he’s fighting the need to thrust. “Hellkitten, please…”

  I’m not sure what he’s asking me for, so I move faster. Suck harder. Each stroke practically brings him up off the bed, his thighs tense, his balls a tight mass in my hand.

  I lose myself in the motions, ignoring the ache in my jaw, because in this moment I have him. He is mine. This man who’s strong enough to carry me and all of our supplies—to beat my attacker to death and outrun mechanical hounds—is suddenly desperate for something only I can give him.

  “Maci!” Callum reaches down and gently pulls me up. “Wait. I’m close.”

  “I know.” I lick my lips and lean down again, and he groans, but stops me. “I think I like trying new things.”

  “Well then come sit on my cock. I need to be inside you. Deeper than you can take me in your mouth.”

  Intrigued, I let him lift me and set me in position on my knees straddling his hips. Again, his cock jumps, straining toward me while he slides his hands up my sides, beneath my shirt, dragging it up. Then off.

  “God, you’re beautiful,” he breathes, his gaze roaming over me with an almost palpable heat. “Lean forward a little…”

  “Okay.” I follow his instruction, then wait, but he only smiles at me. “Now what?”

  “This is your show, hellkitten. Do your worst.” He links his hands beneath his head and looks up at me with a heated smile, his eyes half closed. “But do whatever you’re going to do quickly, please. I really need you right now.” Yet he’s going to let me take control again.

  I like it.

  He holds my gaze while I slide my hand between us and lift myself, positioning him at my entrance. He’s still slick from my mouth, and I’m already wet, so I lower myself onto his cock slowly, gasping with the realization that this angle is all new. He feels different in this position. I feel…fuller. As if he’s hitting all new spots, like this.

  I slide all the way down until I’m sitting against his hips, impaled, and I take a second to get used to the feeling. It’s…pleasant. Surprisingly satisfying, as if his length is the cure to an ache I hadn’t even realized I was suffering.

  “That’s it hellkitten,” he whispers, and I hardly even notice that I’m hearing a translation. “Find your position and take what you need.”

  Find my…?

  “Lean forward. Work your hips and grind a little.” His voice is tense with urgency. His hands come out from under his head, like he wants to grab me and move me. To show me what he wants. But he’s going to let me figure it out. Even if it kills him.

  I brace my hands on his chest and roll my hips forward, letting him slide out of me a little. When I roll back again, taking him deep, my clit rubs against his pubic bone, and a jolt fires through me. My nipples tighten, and he lifts my breasts, squeezing them. Running his thumbs over the points.

  “Oh my god,” I breathe as I rock forward again, enjoying an echo of that same jolt. Then, suddenly this is a race to some kind of erotic finish line, and I am determined to win.

  I put more weight on my arms and grind myself against Callum, taking him deep with every stroke as I use his body, teasing pleasure for myself from each motion.

  “Come on, Maci,” he groans, and I remember that he was nearly there before. I’m starting from behind, and he’s trying to hold back.

  I toss my head, and hair falls across my spine, brushing my backside. Callum lifts himself and his mouth closes over my nipple, hot and wet. “That’s it, hellkitten, I need you to come,” he murmurs against my flesh. Then he bites my nipple gently—just a hint of teeth—and more heat flares deep inside me.

  “I’m close,” I tell him, and he bucks his hips beneath me, giving me more depth, more friction, while that hot pressure builds.

  “Maci,” he groans as he grabs my hips and rocks me against him, pressing down hard while he thrusts up into me.

  I come with a scream, my walls clamping around him while I ride him frantically, desperate to wring every second of pleasure out of this. At the mercy of my rhythm, I feel Callum release inside me over and over, groaning as he comes, until finally I collapse against his chest, exhausted, yet…invigorated.

  Alive.

  I feel like I could hike all the way back to zone four. But even as his arms wrap around me, Callum’s eyes are already closing. He needs rest, and we have no place better to go at the moment.

  I drop a kiss on his chest, then I rise off of him. He squeezes my hand as I stand. “Sleep,” I tell him. “Sleep as fast as you can. I’ll wake you up if I see anything.”

  Before I even get across the room to wash up, I hear him snoring lightly. As I take my seat at the window with a bottle of water and another protein cake, the pleasant ache between my legs keeps me thinking of Callum, even as I watch for our enemies.

  God help anyone who tries to take him away from me.

  14

  CALLUM

  I wake up disoriented, in a room I don’t recognize, with my cock at half-mast. None of that makes sense until I sit up and see Maci sitting at the window, and the dream I just had comes back to me in a series of tragically blissful images.

  I dreamed she and I were on my homeworld, in the space I was renting before I got arrested. It wasn’t much, but it was mine, and it was a hell of a lot better than the death row cages at the Resort.

  In my dream, we were in my bed, taking our time. Sipping my brother’s whiskey. Enjoying each other. Enjoying life. Maci deserves something like that.

  Not that I would ever have met her in my life before Devil’s Eye. And even if I had, I wouldn’t have brought her home. She may think she grew up in a rough district, but if I’d seen her before I was arrested, I would have done my best to scare her off. To keep her safe from me. From my brother. From our lives, and the escalating turf war that got us both arrested.

  Yet here, keeping her safe means keeping her close.

  She turns from the window when she hears me get out of bed. “Hey,” I say as I pull on my underwear and step into my pants. “You ready to go?”

  “I guess we should.” She takes another regretful look out the window, where the setting sun casts deep scarlet rays through the tree tops. “I’ve been out here two full days now. Which means I’ve outlived my life expectancy by…two full days.”

  “You’re going to grow old on this shitty little planet, Maci.” I tug her up by one hand and wrap my arms around her, shocked all over again by how small she is. How fragile. This is no place for a girl like Maci. Not just the enclosure, but the planet.

  Her bitter laugh shakes her entire body. “I never would have thought that’d be something I’d want—growing old on a prison planet,” she says. “But considering the alternative…” She frowns and looks up at me. “I know you want to head north. I’ll check the map right before we leave, so they won’t know where we are until we’re already on our way out. But Callum, you know they’ll have guards at the northern gate, right? They
’re not just going to let us out into the general population again.”

  “I don’t think leaving the enclosure would put us in gen pop. I’m pretty sure there’s a buffer of empty land around the Resort and the enclosure, for the safety of the clients.”

  “Well, that’s even worse.” She steps out of my embrace and heads for the sink, where her underwear has hopefully dried, and I get a tantalizing view of her upper thighs beneath her shirt with every step she takes. “We’ll be easy to find if we’re the only ones in the buffer zone.”

  “We’ll worry about that when we get to it. Right now, our focus is getting to the northern gate.”

  “And figuring out how to open it,” Maci adds as she steps into her underwear.

  While she finishes dressing—with what little we have for her to wear—I stuff our supplies back into Hansen’s pack. There’s extra room now that we’re wearing some of his clothes and we’ve eaten some of his food, so I take the food from Maci’s makeshift sack and shove it into mine, along with the folded bedsheet, just in case.

  “I think I saw some water purification tablets in there,” she says around a mouthful of protein cake. “We should fill up our bottles before we go.”

  “That’ll just be more weight. We can get fresh water at the next cabin.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to get to stay in any more of the cabins.” She shoves the toothbrush holder into one of the side pockets of the pack. “There are only two left in the enclosure, and as soon as I connect to the network, they’ll know we’re here. That we’ve been to three of the five shelters. If they haven’t already sent guards directly to the last two—and maybe the first three—they will soon.”

  She’s right. I hand her two of the empty bottles while I dig out the tablets.

  When we’re all packed, we head out of the cabin and I stand guard while she relieves herself beneath a tree.

  “Ready?” Maci says, and I turn to find her waiting for the all-clear, her finger hovering over the wrist screen. “Once I—” Maci’s mouth snaps closed and her head turns to the left as if it were on a swivel. “We have to go,” she says in a fierce whisper as she takes off toward the northwest. “The hound is close.”

  “What?” I whisper as I follow her, and the screen translates in as soft a tone. “You haven’t even touched the com yet. How do you know that?”

  “I can hear him.”

  “I don’t hear a damn—”

  “Shhh!” she hisses, glaring at me over her shoulder. “Shut up and come on!”

  Grumbling beneath my breath, I follow her, scanning the woods for any sign of the hound as we run. But our previous run-ins have taught me that we won’t be able to hear it coming until it’s practically right on top of us. So, how the hell is she so sure it’s coming?

  However she’s “hearing” it, she was right last time.

  I catch up with her as an idea occurs to me. “Maci, can you use that thing to give me access to the rifle trigger?” I’d feel much happier about hauling it through the forest if I had the ability to actually use it for something other than inflicting blunt force trauma.

  “No,” she whispers back. “I might be able to strip Hansen’s access, but I don’t have the hardware necessary to program your prints. I’d need the thing that plugs into that slot on the rifle…”

  “Okay, then, hand me the finger.”

  “I threw it away.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because it was starting to smell! And I didn’t need it once I got my prints programmed into the com.”

  “Damn it. I need it!” I snap. “Assuming that dog is even headed this way.”

  “I’m sorry! But if you needed it, you should have shoved it down your own bra! Er…pants. And what do you mean, assuming?”

  “I mean I don’t hear any—” Then, suddenly I did. “Fuck.” The thunder of metal paws was practically on top of us, but with none of the panting and barking that would give away an actual hound.

  “Damn it,” Maci curses as she stumbles to a halt in front of a tree with a sturdy, forked branch. She’s getting good at spotting those. “Give me a boost?”

  I stop because she’s stopped, but the hound is gaining on us every second. “We’ll only get treed with no way to kill it, since I can’t fire the rifle.”

  “I have another idea. Boost me up!”

  I hesitate for a second. Stopping seems suicidal; if her idea doesn’t pan out, we’ll be stuck in the tree, waiting for the guards to show up. But we can’t outrun the hound. So, I lift her over my head and set her on the branch. Then I swing up next to her, relieved that the limb seems sturdy enough for both of us.

  “What’s your idea?” I grip a branch overhead to stay balanced, with nothing to lean against and the supply pack and rifle trying to pull me backward. “And please say it’ll work quickly.”

  “Probably not,” she admits as she taps on the wrist com. “I just need you to make sure I don’t fall out of the tree while I do this.”

  Bracing myself with the overhead branch, I swivel and put one leg behind her, propping my foot on the trunk, so that if she loses her balance, she’ll only fall back a couple of inches. “What is it you’re doing, that probably isn’t going to work quickly?”

  “Trying to give myself access to the hound. So I can…basically turn it off.”

  I watch her tap through menus and commands faster than I could possibly read them, even if they were in my language. “Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Probably.” She looks up at me, exasperated. “It’s less a question of whether I can than of how quickly I can. And no offense, but talking about it is slowing me down.”

  I grunt in response, but she’s already lost in her own world again. If my medium is blunt force trauma and feats of brute strength, hers is the graceful dance of her tiny fingers across the virtual keyboard. The manipulation of data, and settings, and permissions that are as foreign to me as her words are.

  My heart thunders in my chest, not just because the hound is so close that his steps reverberate through the branch we’re sitting on, but because watching her feels like watching an artist paint a masterpiece. Like watching a champion boxer throw a punch. There’s elegance in each frenzied motion.

  She is beautiful.

  Then the hound races around a thick trunk to the east and smashes right through a clump of reddish underbrush. It dashes over to our tree and heaves its front paws off the ground, then it slams them into the trunk, just like the last hound did.

  The branch beneath us shakes. Maci makes a startled noise in her throat, and I put one hand on her shoulder. “Don’t think about the hound. It can’t reach you. Just focus.”

  She nods and goes back to her tapping. I’m not sure—I don’t entirely understand what she’s doing—but I think she’s making progress.

  “Shit,” she whispers.

  “What?”

  “I’m in the hounds’ programming. Callum, there are eight more of them on standby. Ten, total.” She points to the screen, at a row of ten symbols shaped like the profile of a dog’s head. Eight of them are lit up an amber color, one is green, and one red. “If we kill this one, they’ll just send more of them after us.”

  “Okay, but that’s no reason not to kill this one.”

  “Actually, it is.” She makes a definitive-sounding tap on the green dog head symbol. Then a series of lighter taps.

  The hound backs away from the tree and sits on its haunches, looking up at us.

  “What did you do?” I demand in a whisper.

  “I reversed the ‘enemy’ parameters.”

  “What does that mean?” Even with the translator working in our favor, she is sometimes incomprehensible.

  “The hounds identify enemies based on the presence or absence of a locator ID chip. Like the ones all the guards evidently have implanted, and the one in this wrist com, which also sends out a proximity signal. That signal is how this thing opens the cabin doors. It’s an old te
chnology, but perfectly good for the functionality.”

  “So, when the hound gets close enough to someone implanted with or wearing one of those chips—someone it’s programmed to consider an enemy—it attacks?”

  Maci nods. “That’s the way it’ll work now that I’ve reversed the parameters. Before, it considered everyone without a chip an enemy. Which, out here, is basically just us. Now it’ll attack the guards instead.”

  “But what about the chip in the wrist com? Will it consider you an enemy while you’re wearing it?”

  “Give me another minute…” She taps through a few more menus, and Scott Hansen’s name appears on the screen, along with what I assume is the identification number for the chip in his wrist com. “There.” The chip in this unit is considered a permanent exception to the global rule.”

  “So, the hound is now…friendly?”

  She shrugs, then peers down at the metal beast. “To us.”

  “Are you sure? Is there some way to test the change? Can you make him do something? Like, roll over?”

  She laughs. “It doesn’t work like that. He doesn’t take random commands, and he can’t learn things. He’s programmed to attack, heel, stand guard, or stand down, but the commands have to come from an authorized voice or device. Like this one.” She holds up the wrist com. “And we don’t have to test it. I told him to stand down, and look.” She waves one hand at the hound. “He stood down.”

  “Yes, but—”

  Maci shoves herself off the branch and lands in a squat in front of the dog, wobbling from the impact.

  “Damn it!” I jump down, and before she finds her balance I shove her back and put myself between her and the hound. Just in case. But the hound doesn’t even seem to have registered the motion. It’s like he can’t even see us.

  I only know it’s still…awake, because the red light at the tip of its tail is flashing.

  “Don’t do that again,” I snap, turning on Maci. “If that hadn’t worked…”

  “If it hadn’t worked, the dog wouldn’t have backed down in the first place. I’m good at what I do, Callum.”