The Virgin Hunt Games, Volume 3

By Mel Teshco

EARTH, YEAR 2332

Life isn’t fair. Just ask Violet who mysteriously arrived in a space capsule at an orphanage as a baby. She has one goal—to find her biological parents, and winning the Virgin Hunt Games will ensure her face is plastered on every screener across the universe. Surely, her family will recognize and come for her? If she can only stay away from her Mate, the one man she must elude at all cost to win. But naturally, he’s also the only one she wants to surrender to.

Prince Zel Oscar is used to getting what he wants. But accepting a rival’s dare to be a Hunter in the infamous sexploitative Virgin Hunt Games was a terrible and possibly life-altering mistake. But then he meets his Hunted, Violet...delicious perfection wrapped up in a gorgeous package. Too bad she is totally indifferent to his kisses, his exploits, and his lofty title. He’ll do whatever it takes to break down her steely resistance...but will his subjects see him as a hero, or a total degenerate for having kinky sex in front of billions of viewers?

In the end he must make an impossible choice—keep her love, or his kingdom?

Each book in the Virgin Hunt Games series is STANDALONE:
* The Virgin Hunt Games, Volume 1
* The Virgin Hunt Games, Volume 2
* The Virgin Hunt Games, Volume 3
* The Virgin Hunt Games, Volume 4

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949038385

Mel Teshco

Mel Teshco lives in the beautiful country of QLD Australia, where the open spaces of her acreage, fondly called 'the block', gives her room to breathe. When she isn't writing or dreaming of writing, she is often found gazing out the window at the surrounding mountains and thinking how very lucky she is. With one semi-patient husband, three gorgeous girls, two fat horses, one crazy Belgian shepherd and three cats who run the house, writing has (mostly) kept her sane.

Book preview

To my husband for keeping the faith.

Chapter One

The Towerstone Amphitheater

Earth, year 2332

Day 1 of the Virgin Hunt Games

Violet ran as though the hounds of hell were on her tail. But she was no athlete. She slowed, puffing for breath as she pressed a hand to her midsection. Aside from her bizarre coloring, she was really nothing more than an ordinary human. She had no fighting abilities, no defective powers. Just a burning desire to win the Games and prove to everyone, especially herself, that she was somebody.

She scanned the stone steps ahead, her self-preservation twitching at what dangers might be awaiting her on the next level. She had already raced through the first two levels of the Virgin Hunt Games tower—a massive circular stone building that took center stage inside an arena jam-packed with an audience of ninety thousand people.

Like the old Olympic Games they’d replaced, these Games also happened every four years. It was by far the biggest event in the universe, highly anticipated, and broadcast to every planet and billions and billions of home screeners.

Here in the stadium, every single person in the huge crowd who was lucky enough to have scored a coveted seat now watched giant screeners to see all the action that was being caught on hidden cameras inside the six-story tower. As always, the spectators were spellbound by the violence, the sex, and the ever-present threats faced by ten male hunters and ten female hunted.

Violet was one of the hunted. Not only did she have to avoid danger to stay alive, she also had to avoid being captured by her matched hunter, Zel Oscar. She had first learned of her pairing along with everyone else in the universe, when his name was randomly drawn from a big urn and matched with her name just moments before the starting gun went off.

The rules of the Games were pretty simple. Zel would earn huge monetary credits if he was the first to fuck her and claim her virginity. But if that happened, her own bank account wouldn’t be nearly so lucky. The only way she would earn a shitload of money was by staying a virgin for as long as possible or by fucking as many as she could of the other nine hunters who were not matched to her. Kinky sex would also attract some good bonus credits.

She sucked in a breath of air, her tight lungs burning for oxygen. The kinky sex part didn’t bother her. She might be a virgin, she wasn’t a prude. The thing she still couldn’t wrap her head around was the idea that her drawn mate was damn royalty!

Prince Zel Oscar of the planet Qiymonia. She had never factored that little monkey wrench into her plans. Never mind that he didn’t need the money—the man was no doubt richer than she could imagine. Worse, royals were generally proud and egotistical and always expected by their people to be the best of the best. Which meant he’d do anything and everything possible to fuck her so he’d win these Games.

Her breath wheezed back out. If Zel won the Games, then she’d lose. She couldn’t let that happen. She’d do whatever was necessary to stop him from being the victor at the end of the seven-day competition. She’d stop any of the contestants from achieving that goal. If she managed that, it would then be her face that flashed on every screener across the universe. Her face that people would come to recognize and admire. Not for hercoloring, but for being the champion against near impossible odds.

A skitter of empowerment went through her. She would no longer feel hollow and worthless. She’d be venerated. Admired.

Wanted.

She ran up the mottled and well-worn concrete steps to level three with renewed energy. Level one had revealed an entire collection of gorgeous, expansive gardens, some laid out in formal arrangements, some wild and overgrown. Level two had contained a huge, austere mechanic shop, filled with all sorts of strange metal machinery. Unfortunately, everything she had run past on that level had been attached to something. There’d been nothing she could have grabbed up to use as a weapon.

Still, that meant no one else had been able to grab a weapon, either. Not unless they decided to linger and explore a bit and got lucky. She hadn’t wanted to take the chance. She and the other hunted had been given a ten-minute head start, and she wanted to put as much distance as possible between her and the hunters in that little amount of time.

So far so good.

One never knew what menace might be lurking inside a level—living or inanimate—or if the level’s physical environment would be lethally nasty, like poisonous air, or the huge piles of toxic rubbish in the last Games.

Never mind. She’d do great.

The Virgin Hunt Games scouts who’d approached her had been right. She deserved better than to be stuck with medical doctor parents who’d adopted her only for the accolades of changing her skin color. When their skin clinic had failed to do just that, she had felt as though she’d failed, too. She steeled her spine. No longer though.

She would earn her own accolades by winning.

She only wished she could drown out the obnoxious commentators’ voices in her ear, just as she had drowned out every logical thought she’d had leading up to the Games.

Jackson and Rebecca’s incendiary running commentary filled her earpiece, distorting any further clarity of thought. The pair had been the hosts of the Games for what seemed like forever.

Almost five hours into the Games, Rebecca, and I suspect our contestants already sense the danger creeping up on them, Jackson declared.

"I can only imagine what’s going on in their minds, Jackson. But time is certainly not their friend. Tick. Tock. Hunters and hunted, I hope you’re prepared! This serenity won’t last long."

Chuckle. Will our hunters and hunted continue on and venture up to the top levels? Or will they hunker down in one of the lower levels, presumably where they feel safe? he speculated, no doubt with false concern. Not that Violet could tell, her monotonal earpiece gave away no emotion, not even who was speaking unless their names were mentioned.

We shall see. Until then, I’ll watch with avid interest as the hunters stalk their hunted.

I’ll be with you every step of the way, Rebecca. I can’t think of anything more exhilarating than these Games. I only wish our contestants could hear the crowd inside the tower. I’m getting goose bumps. The excitement and anticipation is electric in the arena.

Adrenaline and empowerment clearly only got a person so far. Violet’s whole body now thrummed with tension and fatigue. Her earpiece shut down, sending her even closer to a meltdown. The silence seemed to amplify her indecision.

Should she continue to the top level? Was Zel closing in? Did she want to test the commentators’ warnings? She hated second-guessing herself. Hated how Jackson and Rebecca enjoyed fucking with the contestants’ minds.

The decision was made for her once she had run about halfway through what appeared to be a massive parking lot and couldn’t run another step. Not after sprinting through levels one and two. Clearly, she should have worked harder on her fitness. Her leg muscles were burning, her ragged breaths flaying her throat raw, while her racing heartbeat constricted her chest until the pressure was suffocating.

But she’d signed up for this. She’d had a pretty good idea of what she’d have to face in the Virgin Hunt Games—a world where survival just barely trumped sex.

For the hunters, the sooner they had sex with their drawn female hunted, the more credits they’d get. For the hunted, evading their mate and staying a virgin for as long as possible put just as many credits into their accounts.

Some of the women contestants would earn their credits by screwing every male who wasn’t their assigned mate. That was an especially good strategy, since keeping their virginity for any length of time was unlikely at best. But it would be tricky working out which of the hunters had already had sex with his mate. Fucking those hunters wasn’t worth any credits.

Kinky sex and orgasms were the only other way to acquire extra credits. She wasn’t exactly sure what the judges considered kinky sex… Different planets had vastly different sexual habits, and what she considered kinky might be thought of as plain old vanilla in another world. She supposed she’d find out soon enough. She just hoped she didn’t have to get too wild to earn those credits. The orgasms should be easy enough, though. Those would all be measured by the orgasm meter from data sent via a small sensor implanted next to the contestant’s clit or penis. And hadn’t that been a fun procedure…

Glass cracking and crunching under her feet, she stopped beside a blue sedan. Its color was a decent camouflage for her violet-colored skin. Flinging one last look over her shoulder, she ducked down and crouched behind the vehicle’s rear wheel.

Level three’s parking lot showcased hundreds of old-fashioned vehicles, which were lined up neatly inside white rectangular parking bays. Some cars looked new, shiny, and clean. Others were old and rusted, many with their windshields shattered and glass confetti spread across the concrete floor. Which meant an ambush would be next to impossible.

Perhaps she’d stick with this level. Not that it made her feel all that much safer than the others she had seen. But then, when had she truly felt safe and protected, anyway?

She squeezed her eyes closed, imagining she was on some lush tropical island with waves gently washing toward her and the sun warming her face. Imagined she was anywhere but at the Virgin Hunt Games where sex, violence, and danger lurked around every corner.

Her ears strained for any noise. She didn’t want Zel anywhere near her. Yet adrenaline surged once again at the sudden sense she was the only person alive in the entire tower.

She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, like her private holography-doc had once suggested. It really did seem hard to believe that just outside the tower walls an arena of ninety thousand people watched every move she and the other contestants made. Not to mention the billions of people watching from every corner of the universe.

She swallowed as nerves again hit hard. But she wasn’t here to give up and lose, or to be judgedfor her purple-blue skin tone and hair. She was here to earn a place at the top for the first time in her life.

She crossed her arms over her chest, herskin tone noticeable against her white T-shirt. Her adopted human parents called her coloring a taint, an unnatural stain they’d done their best to recolor into an acceptable human tone. White, honey-brown, or black, any of them would have sufficed. But not even zecnip injections had budged her birth color.

Somewhere along the way Violet had come to loathe her skin color, too.

She lifted her chin. No longer, though. She had ditched her adoptive name, Sally Montgomery, and reverted to the nickname the orphanage nuns had given her the moment they’d opened the sealed rocket pod and seen her skin and hair color.

She only hoped her skin would benefit her now and blend in with the sedan’s faded blue paint, helping to conceal her.

Violet’s strategy coming in had been to keep her legs shut to her pursuing mate while screwing as many other hunters as possible. What she hadn’t planned on were those other hunters being as determined to fuck their mates as her own mate was determined to be with her.

But she had signed the contract knowing the fame and worldwide coverage from winning this event would not only propel her beyond a status she had only dared dream about, her unique coloring would surely cause her biological parents to recognize her and instigate a reunion.

Crunch.

She flicked her eyes open, her breath catching at the telltale tread from the other side of the car. Zel?

Prince Zel?

In the real world a prince would never chase after a woman like her, an outcast, unwanted even by the desperate humans who’d adopted her. That the prince was also hot as hell with his short coffee-colored hair, his piercing forest green eyes, and his harder-than-steel physique shouldn’t bother her half as much as it did.

Except even girls like her dreamed about men—princes—like him. Even girls like her indulged in fairy tales. It mattered little that this prince wasn’t some white knight in shining armor—-his playboy reputation preceded him even here on Earth.

He liked women. A lot of women.

Crack.

She froze at the next footstep, her entire focus again centering on the approaching hunter or hunted. The broken glass was nothing short of an alarm system. Not that it would help her to escape. But at least it warned her of incoming intruders.

Dropping onto her side, she rolled under the car, thankful for her thick leather pants and knee-high boots. She winced. Her thin T-shirt, on the other hand, wasn’t quite up to the task. Glass dug straight through the shirt’s material into her upper arm.

She bit back a gasp as blood slid past her wrist, warming her skin and dripping onto the concrete.

But soon enough her attention was drawn to the thick soles of a man’s boots, the toes of which were now facing her way under the blue car’s trunk. It was definitely the prince’s boots. Unlike the other hunters, she had noticed everything about him, including his footwear, as they’d stood on the opening ceremony platform where they’d all been introduced.

She drew free a large, jagged piece of glass from her arm, ignoring the fresh spurt of blood. At least she had a weapon now, something obviously sharp enough to pierce flesh.

I know you’re under the car, Violet.

Her heart sank even as it skipped a beat. His foreign, cultured voice was warmer than honey and smoother than whiskey, and so damn sexy her whole body ached for just a few more words. Even the way he said her name made her throat drier than dust.

Leave me alone, she gritted out.

"You know I can’t do that. But what I can do is promise not to hurt you."

She snorted. I bet you say that to all your prisoners.

You’re not my prisoner.

Only if I don’t give in and do what you ask.

His sigh was a slip of fantasy down her spine. I want to win, and you don’t want to lose. And, though I admire your tenacity, I’ve already tracked you down, not even a handful of hours into the Games.

Yeah, but then, I’m a bit hard to miss, aren’t I? she said pragmatically. She wasn’t some helpless child stuck in a space pod now. She’d weather whatever tempest was cast her way to triumph in the end.

You are, he agreed. I couldn’t take my eyes off you when you stood with the other hunted on the platform. Your hair, your skin, your eyes are exquisite. You’re one of a kind.

Was he trying to screw with her head now? Give her empty compliments to curry her favor and trick her into believing he really was some fairy-tale prince? Though she had no doubt her gold eyes with their darker tawny flecks might have been beautiful if they didn’t clash so much with her purplish-blue coloring, she wasn’t about to fall for the hunter’s smooth tongue.

He wanted to fuck her…by any means necessary.

She scowled at his boots, then blinked. Holy crap…his feet were huge. She swallowed hard. Was his cock big, too? Something compelled her to inch farther forward, the sharp edges of the shard she clutched in her hand drawing even more blood as she stopped and looked higher. She gulped again. Definitely big…everywhere.

What do you want from me? she asked hoarsely.

Isn’t it obvious?

She forcibly dropped her gaze from the bulge of his crotch, her grip tightening. She ignored the sting. I might be an innocent, but I’m not a child.

If you were, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You’re all woman, Violet, and the sooner we’re together, the happier we’ll both be.

"You’ll be happy. I’ll be miserable."

Really? he asked, his voice amused. "Then allow me to warn you in advance…I do love to prove a person wrong."

She glowered at his audacity. Did he think she was encouraging him so she’d willingly lose millions, perhaps billions, of dollars from her bank account by having sex with him? Fat chance. To win she needed to earn every possible credit and then some.

She might be an innocent, but she wasn’t gullible. Despite her phobias—or perhaps because of them—she had developed exceptional mental strength. Then perhaps you should leave now, while you still have any semblance of dignity.

His throaty chuckle wrapped around her like a caress, and she had to mentally shake off his ridiculous ease of seduction. You’re playing with fire, Violet. His voice darkened. It makes me want you only more.

She glared at his boots. Let me guess—you’ve gotten bored of your royal groupies?

Maybe I have. You intrigue me, Violet. Are you by any chance a defective?

She sucked in a breath, her voice brittle. Why would you ask that? Because I’m blue?

No, because you’re violet. He chuckled. "Your name suits you. I’ve never seen a color like yours in other species. And I’ve met a lot of