Page 4 of Hunted

I folded my arms. “Insufficient evidence for a warrant.”

Translate: As long as the feds could continue their twisted science experiment without getting caught, no way were they admitting their fuck up, much less greenlighting a manhunt.

“And now we’re the target.”

“We believe the attacks on the covens are a smokescreen, meant to distract from his primary objective.”

“Which is?”

“Ensuring the ALDD project fails.”

Zara’s nostrils flared.

Vampire research teams had been trying for decades to make progress on a therapy that might prove effective for the neurological disease. The only way to avoid it was to abstain from shifter blood entirely, which the vampire aristocracy did for the most part, keeping their blood clean while forcing the lower castes to carry out raids against other covens and werewolf settlements, and other operations that needed done during daylight hours. But years of oppression had come at a cost.

Treated for centuries by the aristocracy as expendable, the lower caste had begun rising up against Zara under the leadership of her youngest son, Vlad, who had founded the People’s Insurgency. Now there was a human research team at the university in Austin studying ALDD with better funding and scientific collaboration than ever before and no way did the fang-heads want to see the project shut down. Vlad wanted the cure so many of his people needed. Zara couldn’t risk any more defections.

And so of course the person leading the project, choosing to insert herself into a fanged clusterfuck from hell, was none other than Ellie Crowe.

Two years ago, Ellie had been brought before the werewolf council because she’d discovered the truth that her sister Hayden, who was now mated to my brother Ethan, was one of us. She was given a choice by Guillermo—be changed into a werewolf herself, or have her memories erased, protecting our secrets.

She chose the blue pill.

And I was ordered by my uncle to perform the rewrite.

Three things you should know about Ellie Crowe:

She had wild amazing hair, dark curls that had hypnotized me since the first day of kindergarten when she read all the words on the can of goldfish food over by the fish tank and asked Mrs. Brown for extra work while everyone else was tracing the letter A.

Now those curls were always twisted on top of her head in messy knots with wild strands escaping them to frame her heart shaped face. Add in cherry-red cat-eye glasses and she was totally rocking the hot librarian look, even if it always seemed she was peering down her nose at me, despite the fact that I stood a foot taller than her five-foot-three. She could out-geek any twenty-something Dungeons and Dragons gamer standing in line at midnight at Barnes and Noble waiting for the latest fantasy novel release, something which she reminded me of every time we tried to settle an argument using Battlestar Galactica quotes.

She was a strict vegetarian and a fierce defender of all living things. Her rescue rabbits, Butternut and Waffles, had their own Twitter account where they posted important tips on healthy vegetables and the right kind of hay they liked to eat as well as videos of them hopping around her all-organic kitchen while she made soup. I wasn’t stalking her like some creepy werewolf version of a teen vampire book, really. Ellie Crowe had just always had this presence about her, even from this one time in gym class in the sixth grade, when we had a substitute teacher and I literally watched her take an F for the day just to walk a grasshopper outside so it wouldn’t get trampled during dodgeball.

And lastly, this.

In that moment in the Tracer audience hall when I cupped her face in my hands and looked into her mind, preparing to wipe her memories of me, something irrevocable changed between us. I felt an invisible tether snap into place, my wolf roaring to the surface to claim her as mine.

It hit me like a punch to the gut. Ellie Crowe was human. A connection this intense shouldn’t have been possible. What was even happening? And yet as my brothers watched, waiting for me to go through with it, to wipe her mind and erase all memory that werewolves existed, that I existed, I could barely breathe, only wanting to keep this connection to her, knowing the moment I was forced to tear my hands away, it would carve a permanent hole in my heart.

I’d found my fated mate. A human, whose memories of me I would be forced to surgically slice from her mind like I’d never existed. Ensuring we could never exist.

Fate was a cruel bitch.

I stared into sea-green eyes and knew in some dark, private place in my soul that I’d never allowed another person to touch that it was true, that she was the one person whose wolf was meant to form a forever bond with mine. Which only made the choice before me that much more monstrous. I had no intention of ever getting mated. My duty to the Tracers made any bond with me too dangerous. Connections of any sort were a complication. And when Ellie stared up at me in the Tracer’s audience hall, defiantly calling me the monster and coward that I was, I knew I had to let her go.

I’d tried to forget her in the months after the memory wipe, driving myself harder than ever before on missions. My brothers demanded to know why I never called. I couldn’t be around anyone, couldn’t see them happy with their mates, that reminder of a future I could never have, that vision of a girl whose memories I’d stolen on orders I never should have followed through with. I thought I was done with Ellie Crowe.

Until the first time she appeared in my dreams.

“We can offer our best trained fighters for the research team’s protection detail,” Zara said, drawing me back to the present. “You have no idea how important this project is to us.”

I shook my head. “They’re being protected by the Tracers.” And vampire fighters from the People’s Insurgency, which she definitely knew about. No way would the two groups be able to work together. And still I hesitated. Two people on Ellie’s research team had been attacked in the last month. One had to be hospitalized. Rossi’s people were getting too close.

“Our fighters are as good as yours. Probably better.”

I started to tell her to shove it just as Guillermo interrupted me. “We accept your help.”

I resisted the urge to turn and snarl at my uncle, especially when Zara did little to conceal her smile of triumph. No way in hell was I going to let Ellie be protectedby Vampire Nation leeches. They’d slit her throat and claim it had been an outside assault. Not on my watch.