But there had been nothing so far.
Anthony Blake. The name didn’t exactly feel wrong. It was familiar and comfortable, but there was still the niggling feeling of not quite right. All his memories of his life as Anthony Blake felt authentic enough but not quite right.
And then there were his instincts.
While he felt brotherly protectiveness for Jules and Eric, Liam… Liam was another matter entirely. He had vague memories of a blond little boy he’d adored as a teenager, but when he had actually met Liam, his instincts immediately rejected the notion that he was his little brother. The first time Liam pressed his lithe, graceful body against his and hugged him, his body reacted like it would react to an insanely attractive omega, not a brother.
It wasn’t that he didn’t feel protective of Liam. He did. But his instincts were all over the place when it came to Liam—the urge to protect and take care of him constantly warred with the urge to lay him down and stuff him full of his cock.
Gritting his teeth, he forced himself to focus on the more important matter—on what should have been more important.
Regardless of whether he was Anthony Blake or not, he knew why he was here. Mission parameters were always the clearest and it wasn’t hard to separate them from the rest of his disjointed memories.
He was here to find the murderer. The sooner he did, the sooner he could go back to the Division and have the memory lock lifted—if the damn thing even existed and wasn’t just a product of his imagination.
He was reasonably sure he knew who the murderer was.
He just needed proof.
The late viscountess (the fact that he couldn’t think of her as Mother wasn’t really proof that he wasn’t her son—his memories indicated that they’d had a very strained relationship and hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years) had died in a freak accident: she fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Really unlucky, but not unheard of. It wouldn’t be remarkable if a year later her heir hadn’t been shot on the battlefield. On its own the incident wouldn’t have been noteworthy, either: it was war, after all, and officers were killed in action all the time—except the forensic evaluation of the extracted bullet indicated that Anthony had been shot with a sniper rifle from very far away. It was very unlike the Kadarians to use snipers to shoot down enemy officers; it wasn’t a tactic they normally employed.
Coupled with the viscountess’s strange death, everything pointed to neither incident being an accident. Wayne Blake seemed like the obvious suspect. He was the one who benefited from his sister and nephew’s deaths. Except the man was squeaky clean: he had a meeting with his doctor, Dr. Navarra, at the time of his sister’s death, and there was no proof he was the one who had hired the sniper to kill his nephew.
But if Wayne Blake really was the culprit, he would almost certainly try again now that his previous attempt to kill his nephew had failed.
Or had it? If he wasn’t Anthony Blake, where was the real Anthony? Was he dead?
So many damn questions.
He heaved a sigh.
He normally didn’t lack patience—he was used to long-term assignments—but these weren’t normal circumstances. He couldn’t wait long, not with the way his instincts had been acting up around Liam. He could barely control himself around him and act like a brother, his base instincts slowly eroding his self-control.
He needed to wrap this mission up, as soon as possible.
He needed to know for sure that Liam wasn’t his brother.
And what if he is?
His hand clenching into a fist, he walked to the window and stared out of it unseeingly.
He knew it was a possibility. Even if his memories really had been tampered with, there was no guarantee that it was his identity that was falsified. It could be something else. There could be hundreds of possible reasons why the Division had messed with his memories.
No. He wasn’t Anthony. His gut instinct told him he wasn’t, and he trusted it.
You just want to think that because you can’t accept that you’re a fucking pervert who wants to knot his own little brother.
“Shut up.”
The sound of his own voice made him wince.
Great.
He was now talking to himself like a madman.
Chapter 8
Liam felt absolutely dejected after his conversation with Jules, but at some point late in the evening it occurred to him that he was overcomplicating it. He really was. The solution to the issue was simple enough: he needed to get married. As soon as he was married to another alpha, Anthony wouldn’t be his alpha anymore, and Liam would barely see him. Out of sight, out of mind.
Ignoring the way his stomach squirmed unpleasantly at the idea, Liam went looking for Anthony.