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The hell is she doing?

Next minute a photo of Ella holding Princess Isabella with Bri’s, Willow’s, and Madison’s grinning faces surrounding her appeared on the screen.

Brayden leaned over.

“Aww, look at my little princess. Wow, is that your girl? One of the warriors is going to snap that one up, mark my words.”

Mack lifted his head, deciding how dangerous, on a scale of one to a hundred, it would be to punch the prince.

At least eighty.

Almost worth it.

“We should call you the mate-whisperer.” Vincent laughed, leaning over to glance at the screen, so now they all were. “You seem to have a knack for it. Which warrior do you think?”

The hell?

Mack pocketed his phone and crossed his arms. “Don’t we have a war to fight?”

There was no fucking way he was letting any of these males date Ella. The senior males were messing with him.

Sadly, it was working.

Seeing her walk around the castle with another male’s hands on her would make it extremely hard to control his wolf.

It was clear the moment he saw her that his wolf had claimed her. He’d suspected it would happen after witnessing some of the other hybrids mate. They’d lost their damn minds—and willpower—or so it seemed, and Mack was getting his first hint of how that felt.

In a word, destabilizing.

When Ben and company had strode past half goddamn naked, he’d felt insane and pulled her into a private space. Only then to realize his mistake. Mack was almost certain if he went back into that room, he’d find claw marks in the wooden table.

The urge to clamp down on Ella’s soft neck and feed, to rip her way-too-tight top and tight jeans from her body, and to taste every inch of her had been intense. Mack thought he might shift into his wolf at any minute.

And that was why his pretty littlewould-be matehad to stay away from the goddamn castle.

He wasn’t sure he could control his wolf.

Between his growing lust and need to mate her, his wolf might dominate him and take over. That would be bad.

Very fucking bad.

The king had been clear with Callan and the rest of the hybrids that keeping their new species highly top secret was important. Especially considering the exposure vampires were now dealing with.

“The last thing we need is POTUS or any of the world leaders losing their minds over the fact there aretwounknown races walking the earth,” Vincent had said.

“Sure, but they’re responsible for creating it,” Callan replied, and the small but important group of people in the room that day had heard every ounce of anger in his voice.

While he tried to contain it, no one blamed him.

Callan had been taken and tortured by the BioZen scientists for around six months. His DNA had been altered, and unknowingly, he’d infected Mack and a dozen other vampires.

All were now hybrids like him.

So yeah, he had every right to be pissed.

“I don’t disagree,” the king had said. “However, we can’t have that conversation right now.”