Tiffany Zhang felt the midsummer sun beat down upon her, cruel and merciless as the man who’d abducted her for the purposes of this sick little hunt, and she forced herself to maintain her stride as she darted through the dense woodland. Long-distance running had been her passion since she was fifteen, and a decade of training had given her both exceptional stamina and a taut, athletic figure that turned more than a few heads wherever she passed, yet even she was approaching her limits as fear, weariness and lack of hydration began to take their toll. The leather muzzle gag over the lower half of her face certainly didn’t help matters, the padlocks holding the straps in place resisting all efforts to dislodge it, and forcing her to maintain her breathing control let she become lightheaded and thus easy prey for the hunter.

Her actual kidnapping was still a disjointed blur. She remembered a sharp pain in the side of her neck during her daily early morning run, then an overwhelming burst of nausea before she collapsed into darkness. She’d awoken to find her abductor standing over her, a veritable mountain of muscle and bone, with gun in hand and a snarling hound at his side, her lithe five-foot, ten-inch figure awkwardly crammed into a small wooden cage more akin to a dog’s kennel than anything meant to hold a human being. “You’re a pretty slut, aren’t you?” he’d rasped past broken teeth, a meaty hand reaching through the bars to squeeze her bare, muscled thigh. “Listen here, slut. We’re going to play a game, me and you. You’re on my land now; you manage to get off it and you go free. I catch you, I stick you back in the cage.” Small, piggish eyes fixated on her breasts, her sports bra visible through the form-fitting white t-shirt she wore, and the Chinese woman shuddered, soft brown eyes wide with fright. “That’s if I don’t feed you to me hound. Likes the taste of pathetic sluts more than anything.”

That had been the start of it. Tiffany had been dragged into the back of his rusted, old pickup truck, driven to a nearby forest glade, and dumped there with a warning she’d have half an hour before he tracked her down. Near as she could figure, that was several hours ago, and she hadn’t stopped running since, desperate to put as much distance between herself and her kidnapper as she could, and hoping she’d be able to escape. The woods were thick, tangled and wholly unfamiliar to her, while there was no traffic noise to guide her towards a road where she might flag down help or escape the property entirely.

Worst still were the traps scattered through the undergrowth. More than once, Tiffany’s desperate flight had nearly ended abruptly thanks to a concealed pit or hidden snare. This entire forest was nothing but a cage, larger and seemingly freer than the one she’d awoken in, but no less a prison, and she forced herself to remain calm, hastily wiping sweat from her brow as she tried to determine which way to go next.

Then came a sudden, sharp crash to her right, sending flights of bird skyward in panic. For a moment, Tiffany could have sworn she heard a muffled scream carried on the wind, and despite her fear, she moved to investigate, alert for any sign of further traps or the hunter closing in. Wood rattled and she heard it again, the faint wail of a woman in distress, and her heart sank as she emerged into a small clearing and realized that she was not the only prey being hunted.

For standing helplessly in a cage, hands clenched tight upon the wooden bars, was a woman, roughly thirty-five by Tiffany’s reckoning, Arabic by the cast of her beautiful, dusky features. The hunter had apparently been sending out his victims in the same clothes in which they were taken captive, for in place of Tiffany’s t-shirt, tight-fitting black running shorts and white running shoes, she was instead clad in a tight blouse of burgundy silk, black pencil skirt and stiletto-heeled black leather boots. The latter were kept in place by a pair of leather straps wrapped around each individual ankle and secured with more padlocks, ensuring she could run but would not be able to remove her boots and go barefoot for greater stability. It was an outfit perfect for an office environment, but hardly suited for trying to outrun a maniac in the middle of the woods. The loud crash Tiffany heard had been the wooden cage falling down and trapping her after she’d snagged a tripwire, and behind a pair of delicate glasses, brown eyes widened at the other woman’s approach, a desperate scream forcing its way past her own muzzle.

Quickly, Tiffany ducked down, seizing the lower bars and attempting to raise the cage up, but it refused to budge. Again, she tried, joining her strength with the woman locked inside, and again, the heavy wood did not shift. The older woman began to weep, courage deserting her, and with a frustrated snarl, Tiffany threw her back into it, unwilling to leave another soul to suffer whatever warped torments awaited her at the end of the hunt. I’m going to free her, then we’re both getting out of this hellhole, then I’m going to crush that psycho’s balls with a sledgehammer!

Then a dog’s howl sounded in the distance, and Tiffany felt her blood freeze in her veins. “You sniff a slut, boy?” came the thick drawl of the hunter. “Wonder which one of them is getting caged tonight?”

You have to run. You have to run now! A selfish part of herself screamed desperately from the depths of Tiffany’s mind. Yet her legs would not obey, arms still tugging futilely against the cage even as the hunt neared its dreadful end…