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Ethan was falling for him. He knew it. With every smile and laugh and worried look, he was falling more and more for Marcus.
He’d never been in love before. Never even dated. No one had ever captured his attention like Marcus. He’d never met anyone who was such a contradiction. Marcus was strong and powerful, but there was also something incredibly vulnerable and soft about him. He was surrounded by family, and yet he felt so very alone to Ethan. So painfully isolated.
Meanwhile, Ethan had lost his family and had been floating alone for so long. He had few friends. When he met Carl and was introduced to the Humans Protecting Humans League, he thought he’d found a group of people that would give him a sense of belonging. But it was like they’d watched every vampire movie ever churned out and taken notes from that. Their personal accounts of encounters were vague—and worse, clearly embellished. He truly doubted they’d recognize a vampire if they were really faced with one.
And their agenda held only one goal: kill them all.
A few years ago, such an idea was fine with Ethan. He’d been full of anger and loneliness. He’d told himself that he was on a noble mission to get rid of all the creatures that had murdered his family and probably thousands of other families just like them.
But after spending time with the League, he realized that so much of what they did was hate speech and talk. There were few real plans that he saw.
What bothered him was that he’d never met the true leaders of the group. They remained away from the monthly meetings. Carl had said that they were members of powerful families or politicians who had to protect their images. That the rest of the world wasn’t ready to deal with the truth that vampires really existed.
Of course, those same shadowy figures had no problem handing down assassination orders. He’d heard whispers of an elite team of former military League members who gathered and took out vampires when the timing was right.
But who decided which vampires had to die and when? Were they sure they were killing vampires and not humans?
Ethan knew one of those hit squads was waiting on the final information from him. They wanted to know the address where Marcus was moving to. They wanted the addresses of the rest of his family. Ethan had lied to Carl on several occasions, telling him that Marcus hadn’t trusted him with that information yet, but the truth was that Ethan had been handed that info on his first damn day of work so that he could coordinate with the movers on getting Marcus’s stuff to the right location on time.
He couldn’t hand it over.
Marcus wasn’t a killer. Ethan knew it down in his bones.
Bel wasn’t a killer either. When sitting around the small table in the kitchen, the man talked almost nonstop about science and these interesting experiments that he was running. Ethan hadn’t understood most of what he said, but his enthusiasm was so damn endearing. Marcus had smiled at his brother, looking at him with an expression of love. Ethan had a feeling that Marcus was relieved his brother was focused on his work rather than what had happened to him.
Ethan didn’t know much about Rafe, but if the texted image was anything to go by, the vampire was a lover, a playboy, and a perpetual partier. He wasn’t a killer. He wasn’t serious enough for that. Rafe was all about his next good time.
Winter worried Ethan. Marcus spoke very little about his youngest brother. He was a complete enigma, but if he was anything like his other brothers, then Ethan was skeptical that Winter would easily kill.
That left only Marcus’s mother, Julianna.
An insane vampire.
Lovely.
Ethan’s heart broke for Marcus. He couldn’t imagine what he was going through. It sounded like most days she was the loving, caring woman that he grew up with. But in the blink of an eye, she became someone determined to kill her sons. And was that rage just limited to her sons?
What if she escaped Marcus and his brothers? Would she kill innocent people while lost in her fractured mind?
Ethan hated to admit that he didn’t entirely believe Marcus when he said that she’d never hurt anyone else. How could he be sure? What if she’d escaped just once and murdered an entire apartment building of people before they could get her back? What if there was someone else goading Julianna on before her sons could capture her again?
Sighing heavily, Ethan rested his head against his hands and closed his eyes. He knew his decision was made. He would not hand any information over to Carl about Marcus and his brothers. But he needed to see Julianna, to speak with her. He knew if he saw her, heard her voice, he’d know if she was the vampire from his nightmares.
