Page 66 of Hunted

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ she says. ‘With answers.’

The certainty in her tone scratches against something in my chest.

‘Tomorrow,’ I repeat. ‘You have twenty-four hours, little hunter. No more.’

‘Understood.’

‘And Miss Cross?’

‘Yeah?’

‘When we meet again, I will enlighten you on exactly how much I detest being interrupted mid-speech.’ I end the call.

The unease does not dissipate.

Tomorrow.

For a vampire, time is elastic. Decades collapse. Centuries bend.

Yet the thought of her moving out of my city unsupervised ignites a tension that has nothing to do with strategy.

I tap into Malachi’s mind once more with one last secret instruction, instantly obeyed.

With one flick of my hand, I undo two buttons and look down at the faint glow of the mark beneath my shirt. Thin crimson filaments creep farther outward, claiming new territory.

I can almost hear the Crimson Mother’s delight in the slow tightening of inevitability.

But I will not be toyed with. Not by a creator goddess. Not by a feisty little hunter. And certainly not by my own unruly blood.

Yet as I stand here, cataloguing the actions of a being who has never lost control of his domain, one truth presses harder than the rest.

I am not merely searching for Lyra.

I am circling something far more volatile.

And if Eira Cross believes she can chase a lead without consequence, she is about to discover how wrong she is.

Because when she runs⁠—

I will follow.

13

EIRA

Umbra’s internal database doesn’t look like a vampire’s criminal empire.

It looks like a multinational corporation that swallowed five others and smiled while doing it.

The terminal Malachi brings me to sits inside a glass-walled operations suite, lighting low, secured servers humming beneath the floor. Every inch whispers encryption, military-grade code with occult embellishments, and layered firewalls.

Valentin’s information bank is vast, sexy and heavily fortified.

And I want inside it so badly my fingers twitch.

I learned useful tricks when I was running. Men who thought they were teaching a frightened girl how to survive never realised I was memorising backdoors, exploit patterns and how to disguise intrusion as maintenance. Two weeks with a disgraced cyber-forensics consultant in Baton Rouge bought me more than safety.

It bought me options.