Page 399 of Hate Mates

It could cost me everything.

The Order will not forgive this.

I grit my teeth, my fingers flexing at my sides. The Order. They made me into this—into the warlock who could hunt down anyone, anything. I was their most devoted. My power, my strength, my existence has been shaped by them. And yet, for all their power, they are nothing more than parasites. Twisting magic to fit their will, feeding off the souls of witches until there is nothing left.

Vivienne should have been one of them years ago.

I should have delivered her to them the night she became mine.

She was eighteen then. So young. So pure. The memory of her beneath me is burned into my mind, the way she trembled as she gave herself to me, the way her lips parted in breathless surrender. I could have taken everything from her. And I nearly did.

But something stopped me.

For the first time in my life, I hesitated. Not because I lacked the power. Not because I lacked the hunger. But because when I looked into her eyes, I saw something I wasn’t meant to see.

A future.

A different kind of power. Not the kind the Order had spent years teaching me to covet. Not the kind I could consume. But something untouchable. Something that made me want.

Since then, no woman has ever satisfied me. I have taken others, drained their power, felt their pleasure. But none of them were her. None of them burned through my veins the way she did. None of them haunted me like she has.

And now, the Order has sent me to finish what I couldn’t do all those years ago.

I clench my jaw, pushing the thoughts away. I know what will happen if I take her back. They will strip her of everything, rip her magic from her bones, leave her a husk. Or worse—they will bind her to someone else, force her into a servitude far crueler than death.

My fate will be no better if I don’t obey. I have been given this task because I am trusted. Because they believe me incapable of failure. Because I have never once let emotion cloud my judgment.

And yet, here I am. Counting down the seconds.

Five minutes. It’s nothing.

And yet it’s everything.

I exhale slowly, my hands curling into fists as I let the final moments slip away.

Then, I step forward, and the Hunt begins.

Chapter Three

VIVIENNE HAWTHORNE

The night air is sharp against my skin as I run. My breath comes in frantic bursts, each one clouding in the cold as I push forward, deeper into the woods, away from the one thing I can never truly escape.

Orion.

I don’t hear him, but Ifeelhim. That unbearable weight of knowing he’s there, that he’s always there, watching, waiting. The way his presence coils around me, dark and inevitable, like fate itself.

My heart slams against my ribs as I spot the narrow opening of a cave up ahead. Shelter. A place to think. To breathe. I scramble over jagged rocks, slipping inside just as a gust of wind whips past, carrying with it the phantom touch of a memory I swore I buried long ago.

I close my eyes, pressing my back against the cold, damp stone. But the past is already unfurling inside me, creeping into the cracks of my resolve.

I was eighteen. Young, untouched, and utterlyhis.

He had come for me then, just as he comes for me now. A different kind of hunt, but a hunt all the same.

I had been warned about warlocks, about what they did to witches like me. How they used us, drained us, made us theirs in ways that could never be undone. I knew better. But when Orion Voss set his sights on me, it didn’t matter.

He found me in the woods, just like tonight. Only then, I wasn’t running from him. I was waiting.

---