“Fuck,” I breathed.
“They’ve been doing this for years, and they know what to look for. They knew you weren’t a Vampire’s mate,” he said, tilting my chin up a little with his thumbs. “So they were waiting to see why the fuck someone had reported you were.”
“They’re on to us.”
“They’ve already researched you down to the hospital where you were born.”
“I was born at home,” I muttered.
“I’m sure they know that now.”
“They spent the week researching me.” The implications of that weren’t lost on me. I’d never hidden my relationship with the Cavendish family. Pop didn’t get out much—he preferred to stay close to home—but his friendship with Dalton had never been a secret either. Dalton reporting that I was Ian’s mate had just sealed the connection.
“You’re putting it together,” Daniel said. “Good.”
“I need to—” I braced my hands on his shoulders to climb off his lap, but he held me fast.
“Dalton’s already realized,” he said easily.
“They know he’s the one looking into them.”
“I’m sure his family is already on high alert.”
My mind raced. I’d done plenty of jobs for Dalton since I’d turned eighteen. Vampires couldn’t work for Vampire Command—their military force—after they’d found their mates,which meant that a whole lot of mated Vampires possessing a particular skill set had needed a place to use it. Uncle Dalton had created a company in that vacuum. Outside the hierarchy of the strict military,Strikehad thrived. There were always people and Vampires who needed help and couldn’t go through official channels. I wasn’t a Vampire, obviously, but because of my training and background, I’d fit in well with the teams I’d worked with. Sometimes they needed a human liaison to smooth things over, or a woman to do things a man couldn’t, or just someone who could spend longer stretches away from home, and that’s where I’d come in. Many times, their mates had come along because they weren’t able to be separated, but they’d never worked with us. Vampires balked at the idea of their mate walking into sketchy situations.
I’d done security in hard-to-find places around the world, helped a family retrieve their daughter from some creepy-ass religious cult in the south, and helped uncover and prove some corporate espionage. I’d even done threat analysis for a very high-profile Vampire wedding in the South of France.
None of it had ever followed me home.
I’d been a nameless, practically faceless, part of a team. After doing my job, I’d come home with a fat bank account, check in on my pop and Thunder, and go about my regular life.
The physical symptoms of the mating heat had calmed with Daniel in such close proximity, but honestly, I didn’t feel any better. The thought of bringing trouble home to my pop’s doorstep had never even crossed my mind.
“We’ll figure it out,” Daniel said quietly, his thumbs gliding down the front of my throat.
“Who the fuck are these guys?” I asked in exasperation.
I couldn’t imagine that the morons who’d kidnapped me could remember to pay their bills on time, much less organizesuch a large-scale attack on the Vampire community. They weren’t even close to the head of the snake.
“We don’t know yet. It has to go pretty high, though. They’re targeting new mates, and the only way they’d have that information?—”
“You think they’re being informed when it’s reported,” I finished.
“Yes,” Daniel replied grimly. “They targeted my brother Beau and his mate within days of my mother reporting he’d found her. Outside of our family, no one else knew.”
I barely held back the noise of despair that worked up the back of my throat.
Vampire mates were sacred. They couldn’t just go out and meet someone at a bar and fall in love and live happily ever after. Sure, they could fall in love with someone, and I was sure it had happened, but without the mating bond, that partner would age and eventually die. Not to mention the fact that Vampires knew from birth that their soulmate was out there somewhere in the world, so even committing to someone else was abhorrent to most of them. Finding their human mate was nearly impossible, and Vampires had gone centuries without finding their other half.
I’d always known that my cousins would outlive me. I’d never had the chance to feel sad or worried about it, because it was just a fact, like gravity or the change of seasons. But as I’d gotten older, I had mourned the knowledge that I’d probably never meet my cousins’ mates. I’d never get to tease them about how ridiculous they became when they found their other halves. We’d never be able to raise our children together the way we were raised, running through the sprinkler in the summer, curling up on the floor late at night to watch movies while our parents hung out in the kitchen, trying to outdo each other on dirt bikes, going sledding down the big hill out back.
“Where is your head at?” Daniel asked, searching my face for a clue.
“Those motherfuckers.”
“That about sums it up,” he agreed.
“I’m going to live forever,” I said, the gravity of that sinking into my bones.
