son lives, he will be a Hunter, like me. By thirteen, I was fully trained, already experienced in dealing death. You cannot expect that it will be any different for him."
The harsh words dug a sharp ache in the center of her. "It has to be. I have to believe that if he's out there - and I know in my heart he is - that I will find him. I will protect him, the way I wasn't able to the day he was born."
Hunter was silent as he turned away from her, slowly shaking his head in denial. Corinne set down the leather file pouch and walked over to him. She laid her hand on his shoulder. The dermaglyphs beneath her palm pulsed hot with his anger, but she couldn't help noticing how the stormy colors muted at her touch, his body responding to her even if he seemed intent on shutting her out.
Chapter Twenty-five
"I need to find my child, Hunter. I need to see him and touch him, make sure he knows that I love him. Now that I'm free, I have to find him. I have to try to give him a better life." She moved around in front of him, forcing him to meet her gaze. "Hunter, I need to remember everything about the day my son was born. Something might have been said or done by Dragos or his Minions that could lead me to my child. Something that may be tucked away in my memories. I need you to help me remember everything about that day."
Hunter's face went even tighter as he absorbed what she was proposing. He grabbed her hand and pulled it away from him on a growled curse. "You want my help? Do you know what that would mean?"
"Yes," she admitted. "And I know it's asking too much of you. But I'm asking because you're the best hope I have right now. You are very likely the only hope I have of finding my child."
He stared, disbelieving or disgusted, she couldn't tell. Heat flared in his eyes, but she wouldn't back down. She couldn't. Not when she felt closer than ever to the answers she so desperately needed.
"Hunter, please," she whispered. "I want you to drink from me."
Staring into Corinne's earnest, pleading face, Hunter felt as if he'd taken the full force of a cannon blast to his gut.
He couldn't believe what she was proposing. More than that, he realized he was furious that all this time, she'd been withholding the existence of her son - a Hunter, like him, for fuck's sake. She stood there, asking him to help her find her child, but Hunter knew all that waited for her at the end of that journey was disappointment and heartbreak.
Heartbreak he likely would be forced to deliver personally, if the teenage boy proved to be the same kind of killer Hunter himself had been at the same age. There was little hope of anything different. Hunter knew too well the kind of discipline and training - the rigid conditioning - that would have already taken place in the child's short life. Mira's vision roared up on him in that moment. Now he understood. Now he realized with grave certainty whose life Corinne had begged him to spare in that prophesied future event. And he knew at once that the name she'd cried out in the throes of her nightmare a couple nights ago was not that of a lover but of the child she'd lost to Dragos's evil.
"Help me find my baby, Hunter," she said, the soft touch of her hand against his face an entreaty he feared he wouldn't have the strength to deny. "Help me find Nathan."
He thought about the tears she would shed if he allowed Mira's vision to come true. He considered the hatred she would surely harbor for him if she actually found her son, only to have him torn away from her again - permanently - if Hunter was forced to deal that predicted fatal blow. He could not be the one to hasten that pain for her.
And there remained the fact that if he drank her blood, he would be activating a bond to her that nothing, short of death, could break. Not even her hatred would keep him away from her if he allowed himself to taste her Breedmate blood.
"Corinne," he said gently, drawing her hand away and holding it in his own. "I cannot do what you ask. Even if