Page 3 of Hunt for You

Tedium? Not for much longer. Not if Beast was really who I thought he was.

Unable to resist, I clicked through to the screenshots I’d kept of his response to my post in the definitelynotgovernment sanctioned forum called Weirdos Whackos and Freaks Playground.

I’d been ranting that night, drunk and despairing. The responses had mostly fallen into two categories: Those who were frantic to help me feel better, and those who hoped I would kill myself and were willing to incentivize me.

Not him, though.

He had been a man of few words, right from the start.

I know how to make you feel alive. Then a link.

That was it. I’d assumed he was some pervert hoping to find a desperate woman who’d fall into bed with anything that pretended to care. Or maybe he just wanted to find a woman period and it didn’t matter what she thought about it.

I was open to either scenario.

His profile picture was a muscular guy, standing with his feet shoulder width apart and his hands at his sides, kinda clawed, like he was ready to fight, silhouetted by glowing flames.

I would have bet real money he was ex-military. Or he’d dedicated himself to some kind of organized training.

He was clearly aggressive. Strong. Probably abusive.

Hyper-intelligent. Extremely self-reliant. Definitely a loner. But decent social skills. All the better to lure in vulnerable women.

The only reason I’d clicked the link was because I didn’t give two shits if he hacked me. I wanted to see if there were any clues to whether I was right.

I’d expected to find his amateur pornography—why did men always believe that all it took was a visual of them strangling their own purple-headed wonder worms to make a woman shiver?

I’d figured there was an outside chance he ran a sex club, or some other IRL experience he was selling to the kind of people who looked for things on the fringes. As in, me.

But the link only led to a profile page. That was my first surprise.

Cain.

Experienced primal dom.

Seeking real life prey.

I’d been immediately intrigued. And then I talked to him and got consumed. And then obsessed.

And then… eventually we got here.

Sighing as the adrenaline in my veins slowly faded, I closed all the windows on the screen and began to shut the computer down, but my hands were shaking so badly from the rush that I kept accidentally using the wrong key commands. I had to make myself slow down and focus. But when the laptop finally whirred to silence and I was left sitting in the silent blackness, I still didn’t move away from the desk.

I could see the light-glare of the words from my screen across my retinas in the dark.

Seeking real life prey.

And he wasn’t bluffing. I’d done my homework.

I had to take a deep breath to calm the new wave of flutters in my stomach. It took a moment to put a name to what I was feeling because it had been so long…

I wasgiddy.

Cain, AKA: SleepingBeast, a primal Dom, probable serial killer, and bona-fidewhackohad taken my case. I was now officiallyprey.The game of cat and mouse was about to begin. I wouldn’t know when, or how. But at some point soon, our paths would cross. He would make certain they did. And if he liked what he saw when he found me, that moment would spark a hunt that might last weeks, or even months.

He’d warned me that he would toy with me. That thought brought a whole new rush of adrenaline, and a hum between my thighs. I was counting on it.

I gave a weird, cackling laugh that sounded way too loud in my dark little closet of an office.