Page 90 of Hunted

Eira’s eyes blaze. ‘I’m not surprised at all.’

The tips of my claws emerge before I force them back. ‘Meaning?’

She shrugs. ‘Well, she obviously fled because you’re you.’

The accusation has a vicious bite. She knows it too, because her gaze flicks away for one telling second.

I let it hang.

She resumes quickly, words thrown like knives. ‘Okay, wait. So this fated mate thing is real, and it’s your big secret, and you’re feeding off lookalikes because you think one of them might be her, and you’re not telling your little vampire council because, what? You’re embarrassed?’

‘They are not a council.’

‘The Black Twelve, whatever.’ She slices a hand through the air. ‘And if she’s your fated mate, fine, I get why you want to find her. What I don’t get is the frantic hurry now. She’s been gone six years and you only recently remembered you were fated? Because she doesn’t owe you money and you don’t want an organ, but you want something else, don’t you?’

My eyes narrow.

Too precise.

She has been listening. Watching. Threading facts together with a mind that refuses to stay safely beneath the surface.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I require something specific from my fated mate.’

‘What?’

‘It is not your concern.’

‘Not my— She’s human,’ Eira presses, almost breathless now. ‘So she’s just out there, living her life, while you’re losing your mind, tearing through cities, digging up graves and lining women up like a breakfast blood buffet so you can⁠—’

She cuts herself off, throat working. Then the angle shifts. ‘If your own supposed fated mate is an inconvenience,’ she says, voice dropping, ‘what does that make everyone else caught in your crosshairs?’

Her eyes dart to my mouth.

Then away.

She hates that she remembers the kiss as vividly as I do.

‘Everyone else,’ I say evenly, ‘is irrelevant. Delicious, distracting, but ultimately… inconvenient, yes.’

Her breath catches.

A flush rises in her cheeks as I watch her carefully. ‘You are unsettled,’ I remark. ‘Why?’

‘I’m not,’ she snaps too quickly. ‘Don’t start diagnosing me like you’re my therapist. You’re a vampire. One who apparently has no compunction drinking and fucking and glamouring and kissing other women while he searches for his soulmate.’

‘Fated mate,’ I correct.

She flicks her hair back, jaw tight, fingers flexing at her sides.

‘You are agitated,’ I point out again, furious with myself for being stung by the accusation.

‘I’m curious and insulted,’ she says, her smile too sharp to be real. ‘There’s a difference.’

I follow her pacing.

Even now, she keeps glancing at my mouth as though she would like to bite it. Right before she claws my face off.

I know jealousy when I see it.