Forbidden Mate: My Brother's Obsession

Chapter Seven: What Hides in the Dark

Lily locked her door the way Ethan had told her to, though she couldn't have said exactly why she trusted him enough to actually listen. She sat on her bed for nearly an hour afterward, phone in hand, staring at nothing, replaying the fear she'd seen flash across his face before he disappeared down the stairs.

Around eleven, unable to sleep, she crossed to her window and pulled back the curtain, just enough to look out over the back garden bathed in silver moonlight. At first, everything looked ordinary, the pool cover rippling faintly in the breeze, the hedges standing dark and still along the property line. Then movement caught her eye near the treeline at the edge of the yard, and her breath caught in her throat.

Ethan was out there. Shirtless despite the cold, standing rigid and alert like a soldier bracing for an attack, and he wasn't alone. Three figures stood a short distance from him, half hidden in shadow, their postures tense and hostile. Even from this distance, Lily could tell they weren't friends stopping by for a casual visit.

She pressed closer to the glass, straining to make sense of what she was seeing, and that was when one of the strangers stepped fully into the moonlight and Lily's stomach dropped straight through the floor.

His eyes were glowing. Not reflecting light the way an animal's eyes might in headlights, but glowing from within, an unnatural amber color that made her skin crawl. Ethan said something she couldn't hear, low and commanding, and the stranger's lip curled back in a way that revealed teeth too long, too sharp, to belong to any human mouth.

Lily's hand flew to her own mouth to stifle a gasp.

What she was looking at wasn't possible. It couldn't be possible. And yet she watched, frozen, as the confrontation below escalated, voices raised now, though still too distant to make out words, bodies shifting into postures that looked less like an argument and more like the tense, coiled stillness right before a fight.

Then Ethan moved, faster than anything human should move, closing the distance to the nearest stranger in what looked like half a second, and the fight that followed was over almost before Lily's brain could process it had started. There was a blur of motion, a sound like a growl and a yelp overlapping, and then the three strangers were retreating back into the treeline, melting into the darkness as though they'd never been there at all.

Ethan stood alone in the yard for a long moment afterward, chest heaving, before he tilted his head back and looked directly up at her window.

Lily jerked back from the glass, heart slamming against her ribs, though she wasn't fast enough to convince herself he hadn't seen her watching.

She didn't sleep that night. She lay awake instead, staring at the ceiling, turning the impossible images over and over in her mind, trying to find a logical explanation and failing every single time. Glowing eyes. Inhuman speed. Teeth that didn't belong on a human face. None of it made sense, and yet somehow, deep in some instinctive part of her, none of it felt entirely unbelievable either, as if some buried piece of her already understood what she'd witnessed, even if the rest of her mind refused to catch up.

By the time morning light crept through her curtains, she'd made a decision. She was going to get answers, whatever it took, whether Ethan wanted to give them to her or not.