“Damn right you are.”
His approval crackled through the air, catching fire in the most reckless parts of me. The dark roads ahead glowed neonbright, daring us to follow. This was what it felt like to be alive, to breathe raw, unfiltered promises into blood and bone.
“Feels like you’re counting down to Christmas,” Bronc teased, but the spark in his eyes told me he shared the thrill.
“That’s exactly what it feels like.” I was breathless, giddy.
He pushed back from the table, an amused shake of his head, saying more than words ever could. I felt like we were the only ones left in the diner as he reached for my hand, his touch a warm brand of possession and hope.
We stepped outside into the waiting night. The neon sign flickered above, a witness to this strange and savage joy that built higher than uncertainty ever dared to climb.
Chapter 15
Harrison Hastings
Isat in my New York office, a hunter surrounded by prey. Reports, fluorescent graphs, multiple screens detailing my data. Their clamor nearly drowned out the photograph of her on the back monitor. Almost. My gaze slid across neatly arranged files and halted on the one variable I’d yet to solve: the small bandage, stained dark with the last thing I needed from her. I ran a caliper over it with mechanical precision, calculating what a twelve-and-a-half percent taint would require.
Outside my wall of windows, the city crawled with distraction. Below, finance bros in ill-fitting suits scurried along Fifth Avenue. I watched them dodge cabs and hustle toward trains, their oblivion stretching toward Westchester County.
With a controlled exhale, I pushed off the view and settled back at the mahogany desk. Every detail I could ever need sat arranged before me in regimented stacks. Computer screens flashing failed analysis. Thumb drives cataloging lineage and dilution. Pages of genealogies extracted from archives that stretched as far back as I needed. Results. None of them good enough yet.
I tapped a series of keys, the fluorescent desk lamp illuminating the latest serum failure in brutal clarity.
Her. That was the key. The problem and solution.
I shuffled papers, graphs, and results until I reached a screen displaying perfectly ordered bars and numbers. A lab analysis conducted just last week. I remembered those hours like they were minutes ago—monitoring each process, ensuring the transfer went as planned. Taking more samples than required because I refused to come up short.
Not when everything was this close.
The images in front of me narrowed to exactly what I needed to focus on, and I pushed the rest aside with a cool, clinical movement. My fingers flipped through another set of results, arranging them into a coherent sequence. Nothing missing, yet one step shy of perfect. This set would serve to correct that error. But the damn taint—thicker and more insidious than I had anticipated—continued to defy me.
I typed more entries, each key a hammer of calculation as I wove through graphs. Bloodlines and inheritances. Mixed strains that contaminated and confounded. None of them—none of them—could lead back to the first family of shifters unless I cracked this variable.
As I input new variables, the bandage with her sample demanded my attention again. I glared at it, defying its stubborn mutation to elude me much longer. It was hers, all right. Her entire family’s, for that matter. A mess of squandered opportunities. Decades of that man’s negligence had left me with far too much interference to isolate and analyze, but she could put it right again. This set would prove it.
If she thought running would keep her safe from me, she underestimated me. That had to be why she left, some insipid notion of breaking free. It would only be a matter of time before she realized that her obligations—and my tenacity—ran deeper than that. But time was one thing I refused to waste.
That photo of her—running on a constant loop across the back screen—insisted my patience with her wouldn’t go unrewarded. The other screens, showing nothing but failure, hadthe opposite message. The one nearest me blinked more serum analyses, a relentless inventory of faults. I couldn’t let the dissatisfaction cloud my focus, but it had been months since the results showed a single spike worth pursuing. I tapped a sequence of commands to magnify the results, the last thing I needed taunting me from the precise center of every report. Hybrid. Undiluted.
Unwilling to lose ground, I shuffled the findings into the foreground. Lab entries chronicled the serum from its first conception to this unsatisfactory stage. Each step dated, documented, tracked down to its smallest error. I printed out new reports, intending to scrutinize them against my own projections before the next batch entered testing.
The file transfers completed, I stared at the single variable that defied resolution, knowing exactly how to solve it. I hadn’t obtained the results I needed because they hadn’t provided me with a sample from her yet.
The dissatisfaction pushed me back from the desk, my focus tunneling toward one thing only. But before I abandoned the chase for the night, I retrieved the stained bandage again. Dark. Disappointing. Not for much longer. I returned to the computer, keying the latest lab notes into memory. Every word and graph remained burned into me like her last reckless look.
As I placed the newly printed sheets into their precise order, the stacked files taunted me, imprecise and disobedient. This failure, like the damn stain, was as temporary as she imagined her defection to be. But with the new information, everything would fall into place. And then, in ways she couldn’t yet conceive, so would she.
I remembered when I’d put that engagement ring on Juliet’s finger. Her father’s money was infused into my company, and we began new research into what would hopefully be a groundbreaking drug that would bring Harrison Pharma back into the upper echelon of drug companies once again. It had been too long since we’d made a splash in the medical community. We had the topresearch scientists, so it would be just a matter of time before we’d hit on the next big thing; I was certain.
Juliet moved into the penthouse a few weeks after the engagement. She didn’t seem any happier about the arrangement than I was. She didn’t know me, and I didn’t know her. She certainly wasn’t aware of the rot that festered beneath my polished exterior. It started with a vase—some gaudy thing she’d brought from her old apartment. She knocked it over during an argument, porcelain shattering like the last thread of my control. My hand struck her face before I could leash the heat in my veins.
She stumbled, a gasp trapped in her throat, blood blooming on her split lip. Guilt curdled in my gut, sharp and sour. “I’m sorry,” I murmured, thumb brushing the wound, my pulse racing not from remorse but fascination as I watched crimson bead and drip from the gash. “It won’t happen again.”
By morning, her mouth was smooth, unmarred. No bruise. No scab. Just pink flesh mocking my understanding of biology. I was stunned. There should have been swelling, scabbing, some sign of the violence I’d doled out to her. But there was nothing.
“Juliet, wasn’t your lip cut from my unfortunate loss of control last night?” I’d inquired over breakfast.
She looked almost surprised at the mention, as though she’d forgotten all about the incident. She reached up to her lip. “Oh, um, yes, I think it was. It must have healed up overnight, thankfully.”
