Page 16 of Hunted

Vlad raised an eyebrow. “Last time I checked, that’s not up to you.”

Tonight, he had short blond hair, a tribal tattoo by his left eye I was pretty sure was fake, and rings in each ear. He commanded the People’s Insurgency, the most successful rebellion against the Vampire Nation in its history, with nearly one third of the lower caste having defected to date. Zara’s attempts to send assassins to try to kill or kidnap him and bring him before her had all failed. But Vlad could never relax, rarely slept in the same place more than a few nights in a row, and constantly changed his appearance.

“If the two of you are done with the Alpha wolf, prince of the vampires showdown, maybe we could focus a little?” Ellie said dryly. “I need to get up to my lab and make sure nothing has been tampered with. We’re very careful about who comes in and out. Right now there are who knows how many people without clearance poking through our workstations. I can’t run the risk that this whole attack tonight could have been staged to contaminate samples or erase our data. I need to get up there.”

As she said it, she swayed in place, gripping the front of my hoodie to steady herself.

“You should sit down. I’m worried you look so pale.” I traced a strand of hair that had come loose from the messy knot on top of her head. “I’m sorry I freaked out.”

“You’ve just been focused on trying to keep me safe.” She leaned into my touch, cheek resting against the pad of my thumb. Warmth pooled low in my stomach. Her eyes lifted to mine, pale gray-green pools of starlight that burned on the back of my eyelids.

“Ellie,” I whispered roughly.

She sighed, inhaling my scent like she hadn’t been able to breathe for the seven days we’d been apart. And I knew then that I was lost.

This, us, couldn’t happen. And every time I allowed myself to get lost in her, I was only prolonging the inevitable.

It didn’t matter that we both knew she was my fated mate. Or even that I was a wolf and she’d made it clear that she had no intention of ever becoming one. Attitudes were changing, even among hardliner Alphas like my father who’d once forbade my brothers from going near the human girls they loved. The Blood Moon pack had an alliance with the vampires. A relationship between a human and a wolf wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle.

Except that in the quiet moments when I lay alone in my bed, staring up at the ceiling, my psychic connection with Ellie so raw, so intense that it was all I could do to keep from stealing into her dreams where we would lose ourselves in each other until dawn, I couldn’t escape the soul-crushing guilt over what I’d done to her.

From the time I’d been old enough to walk, my mother, Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell, one of the most powerful Tracers in history, had warned me of the dangers of amassing too much power. That those who coveted strength and control over those weaker than themselves rarely ended up happy, no matter how much they told themselves they were acting for the right reasons. Using magic against someone weaker than you was a dangerous line to cross. Magic, like everything else in the universe, liked laws and limits. Taking without limits had a way of eating away at your insides, slowly corroding even if you couldn’t see it right away. A cancer it was impossible to detect until it was too late.

I had held Ellie Crowe’s face in my hands when Guillermo ordered her memories erased, stared into those depthless sea green eyes, and seen the truth, that we were destined for one another. I should have told her then, should have stepped in front of her as we stood before the Council, consequences be damned, and defended her no matter how many wolves my uncle sent to rip out my throat.

I hadn’t.

Like the feckless bastard I was, I had erased her memories anyway. There was no going back from that, no forgiving what I’d done. We were linked because in the moment I’d held power over her, when I could have been the better man and defied the werewolf council, I’d taken the coward’s way out and followed fucking orders. Like we all hadn’t heard that line before across the worst moments in history. Some people didn’t deserve happy endings.

I sure as hell didn’t deserve mine.

Ellie Crowe had stared up at me. Strong. Defiant to the last second as I cupped her face in my hands. But in her mind I heard her silent terror, the same sickening panic that swept over all the rewrites in the last seconds. It was the reason I no longer slept at night. The reason I could no longer bear to look at my own face in the mirror. At some point, if some part of me hadn’t yet stopped believing in what we were fighting for, I’d definitely begun to silently loathe the means by which we justified doing it. I was a stealer of souls. And I had traded in my own in return.

I’d had the choice. The chance to be a better man, the kind of man my mother had hoped I’d grow up to be. Ellie Crowe had been human. Defenseless against my neural manipulator gift. And I’d used my power to lock her in a never-ending cycle of nightmares and anxiety that sometimes I was sure she would never escape.

She shouldn’t have wanted to be with me, shouldn’t have wanted us. That she did was the depraved, twisted power of my suggestion, my magic warping her thoughts, making her believe she wanted that connection between us, a connection I’d forced on her. She should have wanted to get as far away from me as possible. I could never allow it to happen, no matter how much it killed me every time I walked away from her, my fated mate, because to allow anything permanent to happen between us would be to accept a bond I’d essentially forced upon her. I’d been too weak to say no then. I would do the right thing by her now.

She swayed again and I pulled her to me before she could fall. Her fingers twined around my neck, curling into the fabric of my shirt. I inhaled the sweet scent of her hair, drinking in the way her left ear always smelled like the ink from the pens she tucked there after a long day at the lab. My Ellie. Mine.

Her eyes met mine. Cold and defiant as a stormy sea. Definitely pissed. “I have to get up to my lab. How about you lose the Alpha attitude? I don’t need your permission to be here. I’m going up to check and make sure my data hasn’t been corrupted. You’ll have to carry me out of here if you want to stop me.”

The hair rose at the back of my neck as I pictured throwing her over my shoulder, carrying her back to my bed and showing her all the things I pictured doing to her smart mouth. Ellie’s pupils darkened, her breathing quickening. Her fingers trailed over her throat, and fuck, I could feel the faint pulse in her aching clit through the connection we’d shared less than an hour before, a link that shouldn’t have existed.

I wanted you to mark me tonight. I mean really mark me.

I closed my eyes, so wild with moonlust I could have ravaged her right there against the side of the building. She made a tiny sound in the back of her throat, and I knew then that she was picturing it, too, her legs wrapped tight around my hips, the rest of the world disappearing as her fingernails raked down my back and I lost myself in her tight, wet heat. I dug my fingernails into my palms, forcing my head to clear. This thing between us, whatever it was, had to stop before we got in so deep there was no going back.

Vlad cleared his throat. “Are we doing this?”

I sighed. This was a bad idea on so many levels. “Let’s go.”

“This should be interesting.” Vlad smirked, shoving his hands into his pockets as we made our way towards the side entrance to the microbiology building. “I so rarely get to see the infamous River Caldwell at work.”

“Where are we on wards?” I said in a low voice as Ellie held up her badge to the reader at the door. It beeped once, allowing us entry.

“This way,” Ellie said, gesturing to a large white granite staircase. “We’re on the third floor.”

“We’ve been at an impasse with both the microbiology department and campus security.” Vlad shook his head. “They’re saying that our wards impede normal traffic in and out of the research area, and that if campus police need to get into the area in case of an emergency, they won’t be able to.”