Adrian is a geneticist for the Glass Research Company. He’s the one who has been turning humans in shifters, but he did it only to save his brother, even if he knew it was a horrible thing to do. The company kidnapped him, and Adrian hasn’t seen him in nearly two years. Thinking Gabriel is probably dead, Adrian decides to run away from the company and turns to the only people who can help him—the Whitedell Pride.
Joshua has known Adrian was his mate for months, but he doesn’t want to mate someone who experimented on humans and shifters alike, not after what happened to his sister thirty years earlier. Still, when Adrian is in danger, Joshua knows he’ll help him.
What will Joshua do when another shifter steps in and decides he wants Adrian? Will he let Soren have his mate, or will he finally realize that Adrian is his?
Adrian had destroyed so many lives to keep his brother safe, but he had made peace with the fact that he would never see Gabriel again. He was probably already dead, and Adrian couldn’t continue doing this for a ghost.
“Are you done?”
Adrian looked over his glasses at the man who had spoken. He couldn’t actually see that much without the glasses, but it made it easier to answer in his best arrogant, I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-what-you-think tone. “Obviously not. As I already told you and your boss, I still haven’t figured out exactly what the problem is, so I can’t solve it. Having you breathing down my neck is not going to help me work faster.” Adrian was actually impressed with himself. He might be shaking in his boots inside, but his voice dripped disdain.
Erick Talley, the man who had talked to Adrian, was his liaison with Rayford E. Glass, the president of the Glass Research Company, which meant that as soon as he stepped out of the room he was going to call his boss and repeat what Adrian had just said. Glass was then going to call Adrian and threaten him to kill his brother if he didn’t work harder and faster. It was routine by now. What was different was that Adrian wasn’t going to actually do it this time. He wouldn’t even answer his phone.
“We’ll leave you to your work, then.”
Adrian didn’t even look up this time. He listened as Talley and his bodyguard exited the room, wondering once again why on earth the man needed a bodyguard inside the secured building the lab was in. It wasn’t like Adrian could kill him by throwing distilled water at him or something.
Adrian relaxed only when all the sounds outside his lab vanished. He didn’t need to check the microscope, not really. He already knew what the problem was, and he had already solved it, but Glass didn’t know that. It was the reason why Adrian was against human experimentation.
Shifters were born sharing their body with their animal half. They might have looked completely human, but there were huge differences with the human body. Their bones were both stronger and more malleable than a human’s, as weird as that might sound. It was what they needed to change form, and humans obviously didn’t have this, which was why the ones he had injected with his first serum had never been able to shift. He had found out how to correct this only recently, just in time to help Oliver. The man would have to take the serum for life, but it was better than dying.
Adrian wanted to stop doing those experiments. He wanted to help people, not kill them. He wanted to help those that had been hurt in the labs, but he couldn’t do anything while he still worked in the Glass Company.
So Adrian had a plan, and he sure hoped it was going to work, because the company was going to kill him once they found out he’d done what he was about to do.
He was going to run away. He was also going to erase every single formula and whatnot he could find in the company’s database before destroying all the samples in the lab. Adrian had no doubt that they had other samples stashed around, but they were all old ones, therefore useless, because they couldn’t use them to create shifters. There was only one sample of the new serum, and Adrian had it.
He knew he should have destroyed it, that nothing good would come out of it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Years of research and hard work were concentrated in that small syringe. It almost felt like destroying a part of himself.
Adrian nervously looked at the clock, his fingers thrumming on the metal table, the noise loud in the deserted lab. It was almost time. He was one of the few to stay and work until ten PM every night, and he was glad he had started doing that. No one would find it weird for him to stay late today, and it gave him about an hour to destroy the database and the samples before leaving.
Adrian was going to do what he had to do, walk home like always and sneak out the back. His car was already packed with his most important belongings, the things he just couldn’t abandon. He knew he would never go back to his home in New York, and he didn’t really care as long as he had the few things that were dear to him.
Adrian had planned to drive all the way to Whitedell, and he hoped the pride would accept him in at least for a while, or help him find a safe place. They were his only hope, and they had been understanding when he’d been there to help Oliver. He had explained to the Alpha exactly why he had done what he had done, and while they didn’t condone it, they had seemed to understand.
