For the next five days, Vicky followed the same pattern of meeting Duncan in the old sewer tunnels while Nathan went out to hunt. They’d spoken with fifteen of the establishments Duncan knew about, none of them had seen or heard anything unusual.

When she finished in the sewers, she would go to Nathan’s apartment and wait for him there. She found it easier for her to leave his place and return to her hotel room than to have him leave her room while she remained behind. Found it easier not to have his scent all over everything in her rooms, tormenting her with his absence.

More than a few times, she contemplated returning to Ronan’s and never seeing Nathan again. If he came to visit Kadence, she would do what every respectable adult in her situation should do—hide.

If she returned to Ronan’s, she could come up with a plan for her life. She wasn’t ready to return home to her family, but being within a thousand-mile radius of Nathan when he became engaged would be a “the train derailed, took out the station, plowed through a building, and toppled off a cliff” kind of horrible idea when it happened.

She was already in this too deep. It would gut her when she lost Nathan; it wouldn’t kill her right away, but it would eat her from the inside out until she found a way to end her existence or went off the rails.

She could go to Paris as she’d always dreamed and find herself a Frenchman who could talk dirty to her in a sexy accent. However, a Frenchman simply wouldn’t do. She wanted a hunter with eyes like the sky and a body she couldn’t get enough of touching.

If I’m already doomed, then why not embrace that doom and enjoy as much time with him as I can?

Under that reasoning, she should give in and sleep with him too, but somehow she’d maintained enough restraint to keep that disaster from occurring. Once it did, her compulsion to seal the mate bond would increase until she had little control over it. She wouldn’t accelerate her inevitable demise because she couldn’t stop herself from having sex with him.

Her life was tied to his through a twist of demon DNA that made vampires monogamous for life if they found their mates. She supposed it was the price they paid for immortality, superior senses, and strength, but it sucked for those who found mates they could never bond with or had mates who perished.

It didn’t help she was coming to care for Nathan. She actually liked the hunter. Every time she spoke with him, her heart beat faster; every time she saw him, she had to restrain herself from running into his arms.

Whenever he got the chance, he touched her in some small way. At first, she’d believed it was sexual, but when many of those caresses didn’t lead to them toppling into bed together, she started to realize he was trying to show her she deserved his kindness without drawing attention to what he was doing.

Gradually, he made it so she stopped flinching away from his touch. She still occasionally shied away from others, but nowhere near as often as before.

And it made her care for him more. No, more than care, the man was taking possession of her heart. She’d tried to keep an emotional distance from him, but it was impossible.

After the fifth night, she returned from another useless hunt in the sewers to Nathan’s apartment building. Stepping through the front door, she grimaced when she heard the man yelling at his wife again. A slap and a cry followed his vile words.

That was it! She had no right interfering in any relationship, and certainly not a human one, but this bastard had gotten on every one of her already frazzled nerves. She wouldn’t tolerate anyone being abused.

Stalking over to the door, Vicky banged on it. On the other side, the man continued to rant and rave at his battered wife, but when Vicky pounded on the door again, his yelling subsided. The floor vibrated beneath her feet as heavy footsteps thundered toward the door.

When the door flung open, Vicky found herself staring at six feet of irate male. The abusive bastard’s face was florid as his beady, bloodshot eyes pinned her to the spot. The stench of alcohol wafting from him would make a human drunk.

“What ’da ya wan’?” he slurred.

“For you to stop abusing your wife,” she retorted.

Those beady eyes narrowed at her. His lips skimmed back to reveal his cigarette-stained teeth. “Fuck off, ya bitch.”

Vicky glared back at the man and stepped closer to him. His eyes widened as, instead of cowering, she got further in his face. “This bitch is going to knock you on your ass.”

He started to laugh, but before he could reply, Vicky pulled her arm back and coldcocked him square in the face. She didn’t punch him hard enough to kill him, but he dropped like she’d shot him with an elephant tranquilizer.

When he hit the ground, Vicky spotted the woman standing behind him. She had her hand against her swollen face; yellow bruises circled both her eyes, and tears streaked her reddened cheeks. The woman gawked at Vicky like she was an alien who just beamed into her doorway.

“I warned him,” Vicky said to the woman. She shoved the man out of the doorway with her foot and grabbed the doorknob. “Do yourself a favor and leave this asshole before he kills you.”

Vicky shut the door. She’d like to say or do so much more for the woman, but she’d already involved herself in a human relationship far more than she should. Hopefully, the woman left. If not, maybe that giant piece of donkey turd would start keeping his hands to himself. Vicky doubted it, but she’d done what she could, and more than she should.

Walking away, she trudged tiredly up the disgusting stairs. Tonight, she’d spent more time below ground and seen too many lost people. The sad faces of those dwelling under the earth had started to haunt her dreams.

Over the days, it had crossed her mind to stop this search; it wasn’t getting them anywhere, and it was far more heart-wrenching than she’d anticipated, but she’d become determined to speak with everyone Duncan knew.

She’d started this; she would complete it and not because she still believed it would lead to Joseph. She kept going because she owed it to those people to offer whatever help and kindness she could. There had been a time when she’d desperately hoped no one had forgotten her, and those people had to know not everyone had forgotten them.

Turning the corner, her phone rang as she walked toward Nathan’s apartment. She hated that she smiled when she saw his name on the screen.

“You’re pathetic.” She didn’t bother to argue with herself as she answered the phone. “Hello,” she purred, refusing to let him know how exhausted she was.

“You okay?” he asked, which was not his typical greeting. Usually, it was something dirty and knee-knocking.

“Fine, why?”

“You sound off.”

She thought she sounded perfectly normal, but apparently not. What did it mean that he noticed? Was there something in his hunter DNA also reacting to her?

Stop it! No hopes up!

Kadence may have returned to Ronan after he set her free, but Kadence didn’t rule over an entire race of hunters, and she didn’t have the legacy Nathan did.

“I’m fine,” she said with a breeziness she didn’t feel. Stopping, she shrugged out of her coat and draped it over her arm. Bundled up for the sewers, the warmth of the building was too much for her as sweat beaded her forehead. “Another night of nothing in the sewers, but I did knock out your downstairs neighbor.”

“The wife beater?”

“Yep.”

“He deserved it.”

“He did.”

Nathan listened to her tone instead of her words. He’d detected an increasingly troubled pitch in her voice the past few days. Today, it was worse.

“You don’t have to keep searching,” he said.

“Yes, I do.” She had no idea what else she would do to occupy her time and distract herself while he hunted. She also needed to distract herself from the aimlessness her life had become since she offed Duke.

“It’s tiring you.”

“No, it’s not. I’m tired today, but I didn’t sleep well last night,” she admitted.

“Dreams of me waking you up?”

She chuckled as she removed her key from her jeans pocket and stopped outside Nathan’s door. She unlocked the door and swung it open.

“That was part of it,” she said.

Usually, she would have told him, yes, dreams of him plagued her all night, but she found herself unable to play it off right now.

“And the other part?” he asked.

“Those people,” she whispered, and unexpected tears burned her eyes.

Nathan had been about to shift the truck into gear, but he sat back in his seat as Vicky’s sadness beat at him across the line. He should have guessed that was the cause of her growing distress. She was far from naïve, she’d experienced more horror in her short life than some vampires experienced over centuries, but her experiences hadn’t made her bitter. He suspected she’d become more sympathetic to the plight of others instead of less.

“I don’t want you doing this anymore,” he said.

“You don’t have a choice. I’m my own woman and—”

Her loud grunt suddenly filtered across the line. Nathan winced when the phone clattered against something, and the sounds of a scuffle sounded over the airwaves.

“Vicky!” he shouted, panic clawing at him when the line went dead. “Vicky!”

He tossed the phone aside, shifted into gear, and hit the gas so hard a plume of smoke trailed up behind the vehicle. The burnt smell of rubber filled the air before the truck lurched forward. Tires squealed, and horns blared as his pickup shot out of the parking lot and onto a busy street.

A delivery truck nearly broadsided his pickup before Nathan yanked the wheel. When the ass end of the pickup fishtailed, he righted it and swerved around an oncoming taxi.

If someone had touched her, if someone hurt her, he’d tear them apart. He stomped on the accelerator, praying he wasn’t already too late.