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Luc shrugged, halting his forward progress a few feet from Roman. “I wouldn’t go that far. I just wanted you a little…untethered. Thought maybe if you had to cut ties with humanity for a bit, had to keep moving, you might welcome your old friend back.”

“You were murdering people just to keep me on the move and push me back into your brotherly arms? A little extreme, do you not think?”

“I never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it. Mostly.”

So Danny had been right—Luc was choosing his victims deliberately. Not completely lost, then.

Roman took his own step forward, remaining just out of Luc’s reach. “And if I were to have you back in my life, how could I be assured Danny would be safe?”

Luc laughed then. It wasn’t the old, carefree laugh Roman had loved to hear from his friend once upon a time. It was cold. Bitter. “I think you misunderstand. I wanted you back. Past tense, mon ami. Things have changed—for the both of us, I think.”

Roman wasn’t exactly surprised. He couldn’t see the pair of them picking up where they had left off either. “And what do you want now, Luc?”

“Before I answer that, I want to know something.”

Roman nodded for him to continue.

“What made you a believer? Why are you so certain, now, that you’ve found your mate?”

Even with the sunglasses, Roman could feel the intensity of Luc’s gaze as he asked the question.

Roman considered not answering, considered pushing the conversation away from Danny again, but if some honesty was required to end this toxic chase, Roman needed to provide it.

“I could just feel it. When I met him. My demon…calmed. My mind cleared. I just…wanted him. Want him. I can already feel him tethering me, and he hasn’t even turned yet. ”

Roman watched as Luc’s face tightened and his lips twitched. “Fascinating,” the other vampire murmured.

”Is that how you felt about Victoria?”

“You know what I want now?” Luc asked, ignoring Roman’s question.

“I want to know .” Luc took off his sunglasses, tucking them into his jacket pocket.

Black eyes settled on Roman’s. “You said—even your little mate has said—that Victoria couldn’t have been my mate, seeing as how she chose to die rather than be with me.

I would think it goes to say, then, that your mate, choosing between death or turning…

he would choose you, right? I want to know , Roman. ”

There was a sinking feeling in Roman’s stomach. “You will not touch him,” he growled.

Roman barely saw Luc move. Roman’s reflexes were accelerated even in his human form but not as much as they would have been with his demon out. And Luc’s demon was always out.

Before he knew it, Roman found himself on his stomach on the asphalt, his arm pulled back at a painful angle and Luc’s knee digging into his back.

Roman heard the crunch and felt the white-hot heat of his arm breaking. He stifled his groan. “What is this, your go-to move now?”

He had been so stupid. He should have had his demon out the whole conversation. He should have been on higher alert. He stupidly hadn’t wanted to antagonize Luc, had wanted their meeting to be friendly. Friendly.

“Don’t worry,” Luc was saying. “I won’t kill you, mon ami.

” Roman felt the tug of Luc digging into Roman’s back pocket, and then there was another crunch, this time the sound of metal and plastic splintering into pieces.

Roman’s cell phone. “Just don’t want you giving away the game before it starts,” Luc explained.

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 to know .”

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.