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I had a bad feeling about where he was going with this. “Nymphs are driven to be healed, so I guess it makes sense for them to safeguard the source of the cure and preserve the continuation of human women. But the spiders…they’re not seeking a cure.”
“They’re designed to wipe it out, to erase humanity. There is nothing good or beneficial that comes from this.” He drew back his lips and flashed his fangs.
“You’re not one of them.”
He shut his eyes, not to shut me out, but to lock me in, to savor my words. I knew this because his eyelids lay gently closed, his lips softened, and his breaths eased.
When he looked at me again, his gaze was raw and vulnerable. “I loved biting you. Loved your thick, rich flavor spilling down my throat. Your taste, that feeling of consuming you, of being consumed by you, I want more, Evie. Your blood, your tears, your body, your heart… I want all of you.” His tall frame flexed around me, and he hissed menacingly past his fangs. “That makes me one of them.”
If he wanted to scare me, he’d have to try harder.
“How many people have you bitten?”
“Two.” A growl.
Elaine and me. My breath snagged on a bloodthirsty lump in my throat. I wanted to hunt her down and rip out her slimy spine. I balled my fists and scanned the room, searching for something to smash.
“Evie. Look at me.”
I forced my rising temper to cool and lifted my eyes. God, he was stunning, with his eyebrows drawn together and his muscles all pumped up, as if prepared to chase me if I fled.
I wasn’t planning on going anywhere without him.
His hands found my waist, holding me against him, and he lowered his forehead to mine. “Aiman made me bite her.” His face twisted with disgust. “It was sickening.”
I remembered him telling me in Georgia that Elaine was weak, that he’d sampled her blood from a syringe and found it ineffective in satisfying his cravings. Maybe she was just too tainted with evil.
His thumbs absently caressed the skin above my hips. “My venom was useless in enabling Aiman to take control of the child in Elaine’s womb. So he bit her himself, only to discover my bite had inadvertently made the child immune to his programming.”
My gaze flew to his, wide with surprise. “That means both her child and mine will be normal?”
“If by normal you mean they’ll be in control of their minds, then yes.”
“That’s why he didn’t make you bite others? Because you carry a vaccine?”
He nodded.
My mind raced through the implications. “You could extract your venom and distribute it to pregnant women. They could inoculate themselves with it to protect their children. How can you not see that as a good thing?”
“I can’t extract the venom.” He glanced behind me, where three of his fangs lay in the sink. “I’ve tried.”
Oh. “But you can bite them.”
“You want me to travel around the world, biting pregnant women?”
“Fuck no.” I didn’t want him to leave my side ever again.
He gathered me in his arms. “I won’t bite strangers, Evie. It’s too intimate.”
I shivered and snuggled against his chest, soaking in his warmth. Slowly, unassumingly, I trailed a finger along a raised vein in his bicep, studying his face as I dipped downward, across the crease of his elbow and through the dusting of dark hair on his sinewy forearm. Every inch of him was gorgeous and oh-so very lethal.
Aiman and Elaine had tried to break him, but here he was, an indestructible stone wall standing like a divider in time, putting the past behind us and bracing against the future.
He watched me intently as I explored his narrow waist, tracing the ridge of the V that indented his hip and outlined his abs. I skimmed along the top of his waistband. Lingered on the thin path of hair that disappeared beneath the elastic.
It would be too easy to stay right there forever, wrapped in his protection and lost in the sensuality of his powerfully-built form. But we were in a public restroom with a sink full of fangs and unanswered questions.
I shifted my thoughts back to the conversation. “Your venom is altered because you consumed my blood. We could donate my blood to volunteers—to men since women don’t grow fangs—and you could bite those men after they drink my blood and send them off to spread their bites to pregnant women.”
But there was a downside. I met his patient eyes and realized he’d already considered this and found the holes in it.
I sighed. “Your bite would make those men infertile, and their bites would do the same to the women. All of which works against the proliferation of mankind. Fuck. What would happen if you bit Jesse and Roark? At the very least, it would vaccinate them against spiders. I don’t know if they’d be down with you biting them. Well, Roark would probably get off on it, and he’s already infertile. Your bite would protect them and—”
