Page 90 of Hunted

Rossi tilted his head. “When did you first suspect we might be related?”

“It was when I had Jori reset the lab’s wards using Lorenzo’s blood in order to block you. Ellie couldn’t pass through them without getting sick. When the same thing happened to me, I ordered a rush on the DNA testing on both yours and Lorenzo’s blood samples, which the Tracer lab was slow walking on Guillermo’s orders. So then I arranged for a private lab in Austin that London Blake has connections with to run the samples.”

“But you already knew what the results were going to say. You’ve known for a while now.”

I slipped a slim pin from a hidden groove fitted into my shirt sleeve and began working at the cuffs binding my wrists. “The wards sickened me because you and I share blood, through the Montemayor line. Ellie couldn’t pass through them without nearly passing out because I wrote the shielding protecting her mind.”

There had been other things. Pieces of the investigation that just didn’t make sense, like the week I was injured trying to break the minds of the three vampire bombers outside the safe houses. Fallon had tried to crack their minds first and hadn’t been able to get past Rossi’s shielding. My mother had dismissed it. She’s gotten through before. She did with Quinn. It’s always harder with vampires. You know this. But something hadn’t felt right.

Then the following month when Rossi attacked the lab and tried to break into Ellie’s mind, the shield Fallon and I had written had held, at least partially, enabling her to run from him. She might have even escaped… until the moment she reached up to trace the scar I’d left at her throat, opening our mated bond.

Rather than strengthening her shielding, it had allowed Rossi to more easily access her mind because of the blood connection he and I shared. I was vulnerable to him, and he couldn’t entirely shut me out of his head either.

Which was why he was all the more desperate to destroy me.

Rossi’s thoughts swirled just below the surface of where I could touch. He was expending too much energy controlling his drones. I had to keep him talking.

“The Davies wolf pack refused to claim you when you got into trouble for your little experiments in Italy.” I flexed my wrists, trying to get a better angle. The guard behind me had gone motionless. Rossi hadn’t noticed. “Your mother had been linked romantically to Tristen Davies over the years, but their pack wasn’t willing to take on her sons when one of them showed such an early taste for bloodlust. And so your mother had no choice but to reach out to Guillermo, tell him the truth about the children he’d sired.”

“Shut up.” Rossi’s eyes flared gold.

“Let me guess, he tried to convince her you needed psychiatric help. But Nicoletta Rossi wouldn’t consider putting her precious son into treatment. So instead you decided to turn the tables and force Guillermo to push your application into the Tracer program through, or you would expose the truth of who he really was to the werewolf community.”

“I’ll enjoy watching you forget your mate.” Rossi seized my mind in an iron grip, squeezing so hard the world shimmered like starlight, electricity crackling inside my ears. I gasped and slumped against the railing.

“No way in hell.” I drew moon energy into my blood, strengthening my shields. I couldn’t project, not like my mother could, not like Rossi. But if I could get past his defenses, I could take his memories, erase months, years.

It was a risky gambit. We were trained to do small, precise rewrites that posed the least risk of damaging our own neural pathways. Going in with a blowtorch to annihilate Rossi’s memories in a last-ditch effort to get Ellie and Hayden off this platform alive might stop him. But it could mean the end of me.

My blood flowed through his veins. He couldn’t keep me out, and he knew it. The gun shook in his hand. The detonator in the other.

He wouldn’t shoot me. He didn’t just need to end this. Shooting me would never quiet that voice he’d talked about, the one that had haunted him all those years, the illegitimate son the pack wouldn’t claim because his father wanted nothing to do with him. Rossi didn’t just want to kill me. He wanted to shred my mind and leave my empty body here as a testament for Guillermo.

He believed Guillermo had chosen me, his nephew, over his own son. Rossi would prove his powers were stronger than mine or go mad trying.

“River.” Ellie was screaming for me. My vision began to blur. I swayed in place, tilting towards the churning water below.

Get. Up. My mother’s voice seared away the fog in my brain.

With a roar, my vision cleared. Rossi staggered back, blinking. I felt my mother and Cris materialize behind me on the platform.

Matteo Rossi might have been freaky powerful, but Sofia Montemayor-Caldwell was without a doubt the scariest badass of the North American werewolves. My head cleared. I yanked the cuffs binding my wrists free, throwing myself at Rossi’s gun hand. The Glock discharged. We both staggered back onto the platform.

Brody and Ethan materialized behind Ellie and Hayden on the platform with Vlad. Ethan punched a guard in the head and began unlocking the cuffs at Hayden’s wrists. Cal wasn’t here. Through the buzz in my head, I could hear him down in the control building, sweating bullets trying not to lose control of Rossi’s drones they’d apprehended. Brody pulled his service weapon.

“Stand down,” I shouted.

My brother lowered his weapon. But I’d known he wouldn’t fire. Brody did everything by the book. He wouldn’t discharge his weapon when he couldn’t be sure it was safe. Not here, with so many people in the line of fire, where there was no way to get a clear shot.

“Make a hole,” Brody barked to Ethan. But Hayden and Ellie were clustered in the middle of the narrow walkway, along with Vlad.

Ellie’s eyes found mine, the second of distraction all it took for Rossi to slam his fist into my face and knock me back onto the walkway.

When I looked up, he was aiming the gun at my head. “Goodbye, Cousin.”