Page 79 of Roman

The older vampire shifted his weight, and he whispered in Roman’s ear. “You see, I’ve thought about this. If it’s really fated, you’ll get there in time, won’t you? You’ll manage to turn him before I kill him. I want to see it. I want toknow.”

Roman felt both Luc’s hands on his head then and had only a half second to register the sound of his own neck snapping before the world went dark.

“Are you okay?”

Roman blinked slowly, and the silhouette of a man’s head against a bright sky came into focus. Roman snapped his arm out—the one that didn’t feel like it was on fire—and the man’s resulting scream was cut off as Roman squeezed his neck firmly.

He held the man there in his line of sight, but it took Roman a minute to make out the details. Young face. Reddish hair. Terrified eyes.

Not Luc.

Merde. How long had he been out?

“I need your phone.” Roman’s voice came out hoarse. Not surprising after a broken neck.

The man whimpered, eyes wide.

“Give me your phone,” Roman repeated. He put the weight of compulsion behind his words this time and watched dispassionately as the man fumbled a phone out of his back pocket and handed it over, Roman’s hand firmly circling his neck all the while.

“Stay,” Roman ordered, releasing the man from his grip in order to dial. He tried Danny’s number first. No answer. Merde.

Roman kept his message brief. “Danny. Stay with Soren. Both of you run if you can. Luc is coming.”

He tried Soren’s number next, swore again in frustration, and left another message, brief and to the point. He didn’t have time for anything else. He needed to get moving.

Roman stretched his neck carefully—tender but otherwise all right. He could tell his arm was still knitting itself back together, but that would take longer—it had been a messier break. He was relieved to see his car, at least, was still behind him.

Fucking Luc. He was a dead vampire walking.

“I’m taking this with me.” Roman raised the phone to the stupefied man.

In a matter of minutes, he was back on the road, heading toward Danny as fast as he could make the useless hunk of metal move.

Roman had been so stupid. To think Luc cared more about their broken friendship than his obsession with fated mates. Luc been a man possessed from the beginning, from the very moment he’d heard about them, long before he’d even met Victoria.

Roman and Luc hadn’t realized until they’d met Soren, over a century after Roman had been turned, what a disservice they had been done by Luc’s maker leaving the way he had. They had been isolated, with Luc just a baby vampire himself. They had known next to nothing about other vampires, about themselves. They had thought they really had forever.

It was Soren who had told them about the eventual erosion of their humanity, and it had been a horrifying revelation for the both of them. That they wouldn’t be able, after all, to outlast death and any repercussions. They would be damned, just as Luc had feared.

But then Soren had told them about fated mates, about tethering their humanity and grounding their demons with a connection to another soul.

Eternal life. Eternal love.

Roman had been skeptical, but Lucien had been hopeful.

So hopeful.

Someone to keep him sane, someone to prevent damnation, someone who wouldn’t leave.

And then those hopes had been dashed to bits when Victoria had died, leaving him mateless, with their bond as brothers broken.

It was heartbreaking, but Roman couldn’t find any pity for his friend when now the psychopath was going to use Danny as a fucking test subject.

Roman had to get there in time. Losing Danny was not an option he would accept.

For the first time since he had been shunned by his family as a monster, Roman prayed.

nineteen

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