Joe's Hunger

Joe Wilson splits his life down the middle and calls it being a good son. Weekdays he wears a badge lanyard at the marketing firm and tries to keep his eyes on the promotion decks. Nights and Saturdays he ties on an apron at Wilson's Place, next to his brother Tad on the grill and his father at the register, under the marker board their mother never took down. It is not glamorous. It is his. He can live with missing a few weekends he cannot explain.

Then a name falls out of his mouth over the ticket rail, and living with it gets harder.

Rolf.

The blond man in the dark is not a dream Joe can laugh off with Tad. The warehouse parties were never parties. They were feedings. Rolf took Joe's blood, sent him home smiling, and wiped the nights that would have given him away. He did it often enough, and then he stopped, and the golden pull between them went thin. Rolf used that thinness as proof. If the high was smaller, Joe was only a habit. A sire could walk away from a habit. A sire could chain the bay and say no in a laundromat alley and call it protecting the camp.

Joe is not a habit. He is Rolf's soul mate. The bond survived every wipe—starved, furious, and still pointing at the door.

A detective who is not only a detective has put an X on Wilson's Place. Joe's blood is carrying a clock the hospital will not know how to read. Rolf has already damaged the man he loves. Turning him could finish the job. Leaving him human will end it for certain.

Joe knows what he is asking. He asks anyway.

Joe's Hunger is the third book in the Fractured Bonds Vampire Clan series: appetite, family, and a soul-mate bond that will not stay starved.