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Either quickly or slowly.

President Calder hadn’t given them any details. What a position for any man to be in. Killing billions with a choice that was almost out of his hands and that someone else would do if he walked away.

Humanity had, as a species, stepped closer and closer to this moment.

Now it was done.

The button was pushed and so were all their enemies’.

China, Russia, the United Kingdom, and France had also activated their missiles when Vincent received the call, and it was likely others had in the minutes since.

It was so fucking stupid.

Once everyone was dead, no one won.

The planet wouldn’t survive this. Humans and vampires wouldn’t either. Nor the wildlife or the oceans.

With the gift and hindsight of living for over fifteen hundred years, Ari understood time better than anyone. A very long time from now, the earth would heal.

Hopefully, it would one day support life and another intelligent species.

A more intelligent species.

But for humanity and the vampire race, their time was now up.

Never in all the scenarios he and Gio had gone over had they imagined this. Probably because when his brother was alive, modern technology hadn’t been invented. Nor atomic bombs and nuclear weapons.

They imagined vampires going head-to-head with humans in battle and having a moral quandary about how they coexisted given their superior physical power.

Never this.

The argument for the two Moretti’s was that humans reproduced faster, so would always have more men and power on the planet. That, and vampires needed human blood to live. A balance he assumed God, who’d created them, had done on purpose.

Unless he’d fucked something up.

Ari wasn’t a fan. The deity had taken away his humanity and thrown them in the deep end with no handbook and a few vague instructions.

Oh yeah, and made him infertile, creating a wedge between him and his brother, which saw him alienated from his family. The bonus point was for leaving him mateless for almost sixteen hundred years.

Really swell guy...not.

One star.

Would not recommend.

Ari had spent many centuries wondering what would have happened if he’d met Sage earlier and created his own bloodline. He still had no answer.

He’d imagined it would be like humans, where there were different cultures or religions. Where you might have Christians living among Jews, or Italians with the Japanese.

Random, but his point was that vampires were vampires. Humans were humans.

The argument of rulership given the race had one king was the hardest one. In his darkest days, when he was angry with Gio, Ari knew he could have challenged the throne and claimed the crown. He was the only Moretti.

Ari also had no desire to do that. Gio was a powerful king, and he’d hoped to find his mate and create his own line.

It never happened.

Then Francis was born.