Thrill of the Chase (Hunters & Heartbreakers 1)

VI - Wells

^^Above, top: Luke Evans (pictured in The Alienist) as Augustus Selling; Middle: Guy Remmers (pictured in The Buccaneers); Bottom: Joel Edgerton (pictured in The Great Gatsby) as Marcus Trotter.^^

(Note: Just like before, italics and parentheses indicate a strikethrough.)

Blood-Binding: An Introduction

By Marcus Trotter

To my son — Do not take this lightly. There are very serious concepts here.

Sincerely, Father.

9 April.

I don't like Langdon Wilkes.

I don't like. Langdon Wilkes.

(I don't)

I'd read those words so many times they sounded hollow. I didn't like Wilkes when we first met, true. And I'd tried to maintain that mindset for the few weeks we'd known each other. But I was discovering, day by day, how hard that was becoming. Something about Wilkes made me want to open up. Tell him what happened to our father, our mother, and how we barely manage to hold onto our reputations, both in society and in the hunting world. Most of them know it's just us now, and only one of us — me — is old enough to hunt independently without supervision.

Even when Naomi dug up his father's name in an old blood-binding book from the 1850s, I couldn't quite muster the same dislike. I saw none of Trenton Wilkes's coldness, ruthlessness, or the inability to feel anything in his son. Of course he'd rushed to his father's defence, but that was instinct, not upbringing. I knew, as soon as we'd looked into each other's eyes that night, that he was nothing like his father. And I'd felt the dam keeping my feelings back crack straight down the middle, letting out a steady trickle that would turn into a flood. I couldn't stop them—it was only a matter of time before they'd come bursting out.

"So you can dress nice when you want to," Naomi said when I came downstairs that morning. She gave me a wry wink to go with it.

I rolled my eyes. "We're having company."

"Oh, 'company'?" Her eyebrow went up. "So that's what Langdon is to us now?"

I tugged at the neatly knotted cravat I'd thought of putting on at the last minute. I'd seen how comfortable Wilkes was, dressed in a nice suit of clothes. And, for no reason I could find, I figured I could at least make an effort to tidy myself up once in a while as well.

"You're saying that as if we don't know him at all," I said, pulling out the chair opposite her and dropping into it.

Naomi sighed, and all her teasing manner disappeared. "I told him, Wells. About...you."

I was on my feet again in a second. "Why would you do that?"

"I had to," she said quietly. "I couldn't hide it from him forever. I really began to feel something for him. And then...then I saw the look in your eyes, that night we broke into the school, and...he had to know."

"You had no right, Naomi," I snapped. "I told you that would never leave this house."

"I know," she whispered, swiping at both her cheeks. "But I see how hard it is. You suppress your true feelings every day. And I wish I could help you, but I don't know what to do..."

"And you thought telling Wilkes would?" Strangely I'm not angry about the fact that she told him, but rather the fact that she might have been right to.