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“Either of those is possible,” Julius agreed, his frown deepening. “I don’t like the sounds of it.”
Neither did I. We knew the Blood Hunter was behind most of the attacks on the Chaos Crew. Probably he was the figure behind this one too, manipulating the army by whatever means he had at his disposal, which were clearly a lot. It would fit his name to be collecting criminals’ blood, wouldn’t it? And he always managed to stay several steps ahead of us. It didn’t seem like this situation was any different.
What did he have in store for us next now that I’d officially refused his invitation? His two-day deadline had passed last night.
I cleared my throat and focused my attention on Petrov again. “From the missions you’ve been given with this special group, have you gotten any idea what the person behind them might want other than blood? What their larger agenda could be?” Surely the Blood Hunter hadn’t bought or blackmailed his way into control over part of the army just so he could do a little DNA sampling. There had to be easier ways if that was his only goal.
“All I can tell you is that he’s got to be someone with a lot of power,” Petrov said. “Not anyone I’d want to go head-to-head with, so I wish you luck there.”
“Are there other squads like yours that might have been given different missions?” Talon asked.
Petrov splayed his hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know about that either. They keep us mostly in the dark.”
“Why the hell do you go along with all this, then?” I demanded. “Strange secret missions, attacking people you used to work with now… Why don’t you walk away? Or expose them?”
Julius shot me a cautioning glance, but Petrov simply hung his head. “It’s a reasonable question,” he said, and ran his fingers over his thinning hair. “It’s been made clear to me by various methods that my family would be ‘punished’ if I go against my orders. If it was just me, I’d say fuck it. But when I have no idea how much they’d hurt my wife or my son…”
My stomach twisted with sudden understanding. Of course he wouldn’t want to provoke a threat to his family. I should know better than anyone here how hard it was to face the possibility of losing your family—it’d been hell for me even when that family had been made up of psychotic child-torturing lunatics.
I relaxed a little in my chair, letting my hand drift farther from my gun. This guy wasn’t the enemy, not really. He was only protecting the people he cared about from an impossible situation. He hadn’t wanted to attack us. It said a lot that he’d come here to talk to us at all with the threat to his family hanging over his head.
“I’m sorry for coming at you the other day,” Petrov went on, looking at Julius. “I don’t think any of us on the squad really likes the position we’re in. If we saw a way to get out of it safely, we would.”
Julius inclined his head and stretched his arm across the table to shake his former colleague’s hand. “I understand. The powers we’re up against have put us all in difficult situations. I appreciate you coming to share what you do know with us—I know even that was a risk.”
“It was.” Petrov shook his hand quickly and stood up. “Which is why I’d better get going. I hope the little I could tell you helps you figure this out. We’d all be grateful to be out from under this asshole’s thumb, whoever it is.”
He strode off down the street, and I walked with Julius and Talon back to our car. I stayed silent until I’d dropped into my seat.
“Do you believe what he said?” I asked Julius. He’d known the man the longest, so I trusted his judgment over my own.
Julius started the engine and pulled away from the curb. “Considering we didn’t have anyone shooting at us, I’d say his story was pretty believable. It wasn’t a trap—he really did want to talk to us. He wouldn’t have come to meet us if he didn’t want to help us, especially when his family’s safety is on the line.”
“He sounded like he was being honest to me,” Talon put in. “But he didn’t know a hell of a lot.”
“True.” I rubbed my hand over my mouth. “Collecting blood from criminals. Manipulating army commanders. It’s got to be the Blood Hunter behind all that, right? Everything else we’ve been dealing with has come back to him.”
“From what we’ve seen, he definitely has the resources to pull off something like that,” Julius said. “The real question is, what’s his master plan? Where is he going with this?”
Silence filled the car, undeniably ominous. Whatever the Blood Hunter was up to, it now felt way bigger than just a complicated revenge scheme against a single family. And knowing about his other activities and the global influence he’d claimed to wield, I had trouble imagining it could be anything good.
The ring of Julius’s phone broke the quiet. He quickly tapped it, putting it on speaker phone. “What’s up?”
Blaze’s voice filled the car, and I knew something was wrong the second I heard his tone.
“You need to get back. You won’t believe what’s on the news now.”
