Page 87 of Hunted

In spite of her wrong scent. Or perhaps because of it.

Fuck no.

Nothing about this is right.

I ended it because I had to. Because for one vicious moment, the temptation to take more stopped being temptation and became certainty in my blood.

My body is still paying for it.

Arousal is too civilised a word for the pressure coiling in me. Every predatory instinct urges me to close the space between us, to taste her until her clever mouth forgets how to bargain and learns how to plead. To part those creamy thighs and drive my aching cock into her until the sound of her defiance becomes something far more satisfying.

It is an ugly vulnerability. One I have always considered beneath me.

And yet here I stand, struggling not to watch her tongue slip over her lips, that absent-minded intimacy striking my nerves like a command.

I should not be here.

The thought arrives belatedly, a reprimand from the part of me that still remembers purpose, duty, the centuries of discipline built on blood and consequence.

I should be in my city, in my Tower, surrounded by my Twelve, directing the hunt that has consumed too many nights and too much patience.

Lyra Hannigan.

My missing piece. My fated mate. The woman who should be my hunger, my singular pursuit, my inevitable claim.

And yet the moment Malachi told me where Eira Cross had fled, I moved.

I could have sent the Twelve.

Should have sent the Twelve.

Instead, I used Aaron, the only one of them gifted with transposition, and had him deliver me to South Carolina before reason could be restored. And every second I scoured the city, moving through streets, rooftops and shadows with a predator’s patience that felt nothing like patience without her scent, was a prickle beneath my skin.

Then I caught it.

Her wrong scent.

Threaded through the air like a blade sliding beneath ribs.

My body reacted before my mind had fully processed it, hunger and fury and something dangerously close to relief colliding in a single brutal pulse. I followed it to this cottage, past her surprisingly robust wards, to her defiant eyes and clever mouth.

A mouth now branded into my memory.

I am bewildered by myself.

Worse, I am aware of the betrayal lodged beneath that bewilderment. Not betrayal of a lover or an oath, but betrayal of the ghost occupying my blood. Lyra should be my focus. Instead, I have crossed state lines for a hunter who smells wrong, bargained for a kiss like a mortal man with no power, and exposed the one thing I cannot afford anyone to see.

What in Netheris am I thinking?

I am not… at least not with the correct head.

When Eira’s gaze returns to my throat, searching again, I feel the echo of her question like a hook beneath my skin.

The mark is not for her.

Not for any mortal to interpret.

It is a symbol of something she does not understand.