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Sloan

APERSON WOULD EITHERneed to be completely oblivious or blind to miss the connection Phillip and V shared.

I was neither.

I’d picked up on the undertone of sexual energy from the very beginning. It was in their every glance at each other; in the silent body language and mimicked gestures; in the lack of space between them that suggested their connection went beyond partners or familial affection. Most surprising, it was Phillip who appeared the most invested in the relationship the two shared. I got the sense he’d spent all of his energy trying to keep her by his side.

I had known the world-weary Austrian for a long time. Decades even. Or perhaps even a century. I’d spent intimate nights discussing our past, holed up in a laboratory with one goal in mind. Not once had the man looked as driven as he did when Phillip’s eyes strayed over to V.

I couldn’t lay the blame with Phillip’s loyalty to Rose because his attention to V wasn’t born out of devotion to his friendship. It was born from a desire to tie himself to V indefinitely in absolutely any way he could. It was the look of relentless passion and every intention to claim exclusive parts of V’s future. It was the look of a man wholly spellbound and captivated by something infinitely precious. It was the very image of possession and doing whatever he could to keep her safe and happy.

Even I posed a threat.

It was in Phillip’s stare every time I captured V’s attention. It was in the subtle strain of the Hunter’s body and the clench of his fist when V blushed or paid me any amount of flirtatious regard. It was quite literally mind-boggling and the most intrigued I had been in a long time.

How had V ensnared Phillip to such a degree, and for what reason had Phillip become an unrecognizable version of himself around her? What about the redhead tore down Phillip’s carefully constructed barriers? Would she be the one who made Phillip finally love again?

Questions plagued me every time Phillip responded openly and without restraint around her, like he couldn’t help himself. Like he didn’t care anymore. Like all that mattered was V and nothing would ever be more important than her.

What happened in such a short period of time?

I had been ensnared by a few but never so passionately. I had lost loved ones but never of a romantic nature. I had yearned for love and union but never once found it. So, it was with simple fascination that I first engaged V in conversation. I had been intrigued by the young woman from the beginning, but something about her after time apart appealed to me greater.

At the start, I only hoped to stoke Phillip’s jealousy—to get him to open up and pursue V seriously. V had spent her life up to that point around nothing but underaged, self-involved boy types. It was very unlikely any of them treated her like the prize she clearly was. Even Nigel fell short, though he came across as considerate and well-meaning at first. It didn’t take much effort on my part to tear away his immature layers and outward persona to comprehend otherwise. The Shifter couldn’t mask his self-important aura or overly confident nuances. Not uncommon for alphas, but still a real pain to deal with.

For top-level Hunters like Phillip and I, we saw straight through the young Shifter, and by the way V acted around him, so had she. Yet another thing that impressed me about her. It was a small mercy I wasn’t left to deal with the Shifter for very long. I couldn’t maintain a cordial back and forth with his type longer than an hour or two at most. Power hungry, overconfident types always got a rise out of me, and particularly the ones without any power to back it up.

I had fond memories of Phillip and I going head-to-head, the Austrian’s arrogant demeanor rousing the beast in mine, and how quickly I was put in my place. It was the entire reason I respected the man. He talked a big game because he had every reason to. In all our years together, I’d never won against him. I’d gotten close, maybe a couple hits, but Phillip was a force to be reckoned with.

I never stood a chance.

So, understandably, it was only my intention to speak at length with V to rouse Phillip’s jealous side. Not to do more than stoke small embers to full flame. It was never meant to be more than that. It started innocent enough, doing exactly what I hoped—agitating Phillip’s possessive side. Except, the longer I talked to the saucy Hunter, the more I was graced with her cute laughter and vibrant smiles. Her clever snap-backs always got a laugh out of me; something I wasn’t used to. And the more I lost myself to her magnetic personality, the less I thought about Phillip and the deeper I fell into my own trap.

Quickly, I found myself genuinely interested to know more about her. I was eager to hear every story she was willing to tell me and listen to her husky voice cracking with delight when she talked about Rose or her friend Kate.

Before I realized it, I was mesmerized.

I sought her out for my own pleasure and not to goad the Austrian nearby, which I should’ve felt guiltier about but didn’t. Maybe it was because Phillip clearly pushed her away, if how the two interacted after I arrived was anything to go by. Whatever happened overnight, it left V genuinely bitter and discouraged. The most surprising part about finding her eyes red and spirit broken was how much I wanted to storm upstairs and demand Phillip fix it. Or how a very large part of me celebrated the opportunity to steal her away and comfort the parts broken by my jaded friend.

It didn’t make much sense to me either.

In all honesty, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the change in my motives; the same way I couldn’t make sense of how quickly I was spellbound. For a minute, I worried she had some ability to capture and ensnare men, much like what the Fae dimension housed.

Humans called them Succubi, demons of lust, but we most often referred to their kind as Sirens. They were a special kind of Fae whose magic lured and trapped others. Beautiful and deadly, and quite honestly, very difficult to fight. Not exactly Dark Fae, but as close as most of the versions of Fae as it got. I’d only gone against two in my lifetime, and both of them proved formidable enough to serve as a reminder how I couldn’t get complacent with my abilities.

What we’d eventually teach V was that several alternate dimensions and planes existed, housing some of the most volatile and powerful creatures imaginable. Some we knew. Some we hadn’t discovered yet. But from what we did know, for some reason the planes all intercepted the human world, and creatures passed through it sort of like a train stop. Except, some travelers either chose to stay or got stuck in our world.

Passing through the planes was extremely tricky. Not only was it difficult to cross through, but whoever managed it suffered diminished magical abilities in the move from one plane to the next. Something most of us were grateful for. As such, very few crossed over without being immeasurably powerful. Many of them came through with an agenda to do as much damage as they could, and it was left to those of us protecting this world to go up against them.

The Organization hadn’t yet worked out how to move through the planes, but it wasn’t from a lack of trying. Those of us higher up the chain knew it was their intention to one day gain access to the other planes, and it was the entire reason we worked with the species who passed through. For that reason, the Organization started to experiment with the genetic makeup of the other worlds. It was why Hunters were created, and it was why Phillip and I would stop at nothing to bring the entire operation down.

The Organization would do whatever it took to engineer a perfect species to cross over, and they would kill as many of us as it took to accomplish their goal. They weren’t any better than the creatures passing through to destroy and upend civilization. Their intentions were grossly singular and done wholly out of self-interest and greed. It wasn’t for the protection of our world the Organization worked so hard. They did it to exert power through the different planes and inevitably reign supreme.

It didn’t take many of us long to see it, but going up against something as powerful as the Organization took careful, covert planning. And without a powerful army, impossible.

One didn’t simply leave the Organization either. It was either death or completely disappear, but very few accomplished the latter. And because Phillip and I lived eternally, we had the advantage of careful planning and time—and had for decades now.