Bound in Death (Bound #5)(9)

Liam waited on the edge of the small parking lot, his body reclining against the motorcycle behind him. “I don’t see her.”

Wasn’t he the observant one?

“We come all this way,” Liam murmured, “we look for so long, but we don’t take her?” He shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense to me.”

“She was terrified.”

Liam laughed at that. “When has fear ever stopped you?”

It hadn’t. Only…it’s her. This was different. This was the most important mission of his life.

The only thing that mattered to him.

Liam sighed and ran a hand through his dark hair. “We came here to see if she was the one.”

The one who haunted him. Obsessed him.

“If she was the one, then we were supposed to take her. That was the plan, right?”

Like he needed to be reminded of this shit. It was his plan.

Alerac marched toward his own motorcycle. Climbed on the bike. “There were too many eyes here.” He shouldn’t have approached her in that bar. He’d planned…hell, he’d just planned to walk inside. To get a look at her. To catch her scent. To see if she was the nightmare who chased him every time he slept.

Am I having a nightmare? Her voice, so different from what he’d expected, whispered through his mind. No accent lightened her words. Fear had made them breathless and husky.

Yes, he’d intended just to watch her that night. But once he’d actually crossed the threshold of Wylee’s Bar, when her head had snapped up and his eyes had locked on her…

Beautiful.

She was just as beautiful as he remembered.

Those high cheekbones. That heart-shaped face. The plump lips. The hair that was the color of the sun—a sun she’d once loved.

Barely five feet four, she’d always been small. Deceptively delicate, but curved in all of the right places. Places he’d touched and kissed.

One look and all he’d been able to think about was touching her again.

“But she f*ckin’ feared me,” he muttered.

Liam whistled. “Is that why the lass is running now?”

And she was. He’d just caught her scent—woman, sex, temptation—drifting on the wind. He turned his head and saw her jump into a beat-up old truck. She gunned the engine and raced from the lot as if the devil himself were after her.

He was.

When you run, the beast likes to hunt.

“Are you certain it’s her? We’re not about to terrify some mortal, are we?” Liam pressed. “Though that certainly wouldn’t be a first. They are fun when they’re afraid. I like the way they smell then.”

Alerac gunned his motorcycle. “She’s mine.” Absolute certainty.

He just had to make her remember that truth.

Remember him.

Damn vampires and witches and their curses. He’d been kept away from her for far too long.

“Then hurry and claim her,” Liam advised him, voice roughening. “Because if you found her, the others won’t be far behind.”

No, they wouldn’t. He’d gotten lucky. For once. A tip from a human who knew the score and who wanted to make an ally with the wolf pack.

He’d found “Jane” first. Finders f*ckin’ keepers.

The motorcycle shot away from the sheltering darkness.

He’d backed off earlier because others had been close by. She’d begged him to spare the humans, and he had. For her.

But he’d told her the truth. He wasn’t letting her go. He couldn’t.

He followed her red taillights and hoped that he’d be able to keep his beast in check a little longer. But he’d already waited two hundred years for her.

His control wasn’t going to last forever. It might not even last until dawn.

It was just past midnight, when the darkness was at its thickest, and his motorcycle cut easily down the road. The woman who’d called herself Jane had ducked off the main streets and gone straight for the back alleys.

He wondered just where she was running to.

Is she running to someone?

Jealousy was there, spiking in blood that was already overheated. But he couldn’t stop the feelings. With her, he couldn’t stop anything.

She braked her truck. Jumped out and ran inside a building—a boarded up, ramshackle building that looked pitch black.

He parked his own bike. Jane hadn’t even glanced back before she’d dashed inside. She should have been smarter than that. Should have known that she was being stalked.

A vampire’s instincts were normally much sharper.

Slowly, Alerac climbed from the motorcycle. He stared up at that building. It looked like it had been another bar, once upon a time. Now it was empty. Broken.

He inhaled. Caught her scent and—

A man’s scent.

Human.

In that damn building.

With her.

His back teeth clenched as he headed for the door.

Another scent reached him in that moment. One that drove both the beast inside of him and the man that he was trying so desperately to be…wild.

Blood.

He didn’t attempt to open the door.

He just kicked it down and raced inside.





Chapter Two


When the door shattered and chunks of wood flew inside that old building, Alerac heard a man’s sharp shout of surprise and pain.