by I. T. Lucas
Her eyes softened. “I’ve never been in love either. But that’s not what had me upset.” She shifted her gaze to a spot on his shoulder. “Sometimes I get these silly thoughts in my head, and I can’t get rid of them.”
He hooked a finger under her chin. “You can tell me anything. Whatever it is, just spit it out instead of letting it grow to monstrous proportions.”
“Do you have kids?” she blurted.
He chuckled. “Where did that come from?”
“Just answer me.”
“No, I don’t have children. What made you think that I did?”
“When Margaret said that your village must be a great place to raise children, you said yeah, but your tone implied the opposite. So, I thought that maybe you’ve been married before and had kids, and perhaps your ex was living in the family compound with them.”
Leon shook his head. Anastasia was incredibly perceptive, and he needed to watch himself with her. “That was one hell of a leap in logic. I’ve never been married, I’ve never even had a long-term girlfriend, and I don’t have children.”
“So, what was that sarcastic sounding yeah about?”
The answer was that there were only four kids in the entire village, and three on the way, but it was still a far cry from what the place would have been like if their fertility wasn’t as crappy as it was.
“We don’t have enough children in the family compound, and it bothers me. I would have liked us to have more.”
A beautiful smile bloomed on her face. “How many kids do you want to have?”
“Twelve, but I’ll be eternally grateful if I’m blessed with even one.”
Her smile wilted. “Don’t you mean we?”
Damn. He was so bad at the relationship stuff. “Of course, I meant we. I told you that I have no experience in being part of a couple.”
She nodded. “Neither do I. I guess we will have to learn together. But why do you think that you’d be blessed with only one child?”
He forced a smile. “I would love to have more, but if I get only one, I want to have a little girl that would be exactly like her mother, a beautiful, intelligent spitfire.”
She wrapped her arms around his neck. “And where would you find that mother?”
“I’ve already found her.” He dipped his head and kissed her gently.
23
Kian
As Kian entered the dungeon’s largest suite, the face that greeted him was very different from the one in the Safe Haven promotional brochure. Without the prophet-style beard and shoulder-length hair, the guy looked much younger, less majestic, and tired, with dark circles under his black eyes. He still didn’t look Asian, but if he wore sunglasses and kept the beard off, he could pass for one, or at least as half Asian and half something else.
His cheekbones were prominent, his jaw was square, and his lips were full, almost feminine in shape. His eyes were so dark that the irises were barely distinguishable from the pupils. If not for the very thin purple line around them, they wouldn’t have been.
How had no one noticed those eyes? They didn’t look human. Then again, many people wore colored contact lenses these days. He’d even seen a guy wearing red ones, which had been creepy. That one was a human though, Kian had no doubt of that. He’d reeked of emotions. Immortals didn’t project as much, and according to Arwel, Emmett was no different in that regard.
The guy was glaring daggers at Kian, but his scent revealed very little even for an immortal, a trait that seemed to be more common among compellers. Not that the few Kian knew were enough to generalize. There could be other reasons for that, like immunity to mind manipulation or actual lack of emotions like in Turner’s case. Another explanation was that Emmett had spent many years hiding who he was, and that included stifling his urges and controlling his emotions.
Arwel had him sitting in an armchair, chained like a dangerous criminal.
“Hello, Emmett.” Kian sat in the armchair facing him. “My name is Kian.” He pushed his hair behind his ears to show Emmett his earpieces.
“Are you the leader of this community?” he asked.
“I am.” Kian turned toward his companions. “You can pull chairs from the dining set and join us.”
Anandur and Brundar did as he’d instructed, positioning their chairs to flank his armchair about a foot back. William and Andrew sat on the couch.
“What are you going to do with me?” Emmett asked.
“Frankly, I’m not sure yet.” Kian leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “But I can promise to let you live if you answer my questions.”
“And if I don’t?”
Summoning aggression had never been a problem for him when facing a potential threat to his people, and as Kian let the menace wash over him, his fangs elongated, and he knew that his eyes were glowing dangerously as well. This was his bad cop version.
If Emmett cooperated, he would show him its good twin. “I strongly suggest that you do.”
To his credit, Emmett didn’t look scared. The guy had balls. “I will not betray my people.”
Kian nodded. “I will not ask you to do that. I only want more information.”
“How is that different?”
“If your people don’t mean mine harm, I have no intentions of harming them. We are not aggressors.”
“My people don’t even know that yours exist. How could they mean you harm?”
Kian glanced at Andrew, who nodded. They had agreed that Andrew would nod for truth and shake his head for a lie.
Emmett’s story was either true or he believed that it was. Insanity could turn a fantasy into a reality for the afflicted.
“Precisely.” Kian smiled at him reassuringly, giving him the good cop version of himself. “That’s why you have nothing to fear from my people in that regard, or me. I’m just curious, and I want to find out more about your origins. I already know some of it from what you’ve told Peter, and I only need you to elaborate on it. Particularly, I’m interested in finding out more about your leader.”
According to Peter there was no love lost between the two, so there was a good chance that Emmett would not try to portray her in a falsely positive light.
“What do you want to know about her?”
“Let’s start with her name.”
Emmett smirked. “She who must be obeyed.”
Was he referring to the infamous fictional Ayesha? Magnus had mentioned that Emmett’s living quarters had been filled with books. The guy was well-read.
“I know that one.” Kian smiled. “And she’s an evil, murderous bitch. Is her namesake the same?”
“Joking aside, we were not deemed worthy of knowing her real name. We addressed her as Supreme Leader, but she calls herself Jade when dealing with humans. Did she respond to my email?”
“She didn’t.”
Emmett tried to keep his expression impassive, but the way his shoulders slumped gave him away. Whether what he was telling them was true or imagined, he believed it.
Kian glanced at Andrew, who confirmed Kian’s conclusion by nodding his head.
So far, Emmett hadn’t lied.
“You said that your people are newcomers to Earth. When did they arrive?”
“I don’t know.”
Andrew shook his head.
“That’s a lie,” Kian stated.
“It’s not. That’s one of the many secrets the pure-bloods keep from us, but I’m not stupid, and I was able to deduce it. I estimate that it was at the beginning of the previous century.”
Andrew nodded.
If aliens had landed in the early 1900s, it could have gone undetected, especially if it was a small landing party. The question was whether the mothership was still hiding somewhere in the solar system or had returned home.
Kian wasn’t a scientist, but even he knew that a small vessel couldn’t have traversed interstellar space, and a large one couldn’t have landed on Earth. They had to have arrived on a large ship that stayed above Earth’s atmosphe
re and used a smaller one to pierce through it.
He shook his head. The entire story could have originated in Emmett’s diseased head, and before he knew that the aliens had actually come from somewhere other than the guy’s imagination, he shouldn’t bother speculating about their transportation methods.
“What are you basing your estimate on?” Kian asked.
“The ages of the children born to them since their arrival.”
“Explain.”
“I was born in 1942, and I was only the second hybrid.”
“Perhaps they just didn’t take human mates before,” William suggested. “How many pure-bloods are there?”
Emmett hesitated, his eyes darting nervously from Anandur to Brundar, who were the muscle in the room and his likely torturers.
“It doesn’t matter if you tell us that.” Kian leaned back and crossed his legs. “We don’t know where to find them. Evidently, they are no longer where you thought they were, which I assume was Beijing since the headquarters of Kumei are located there.”
“When I left, there were twenty-six of them.”
That was too small of a group, even for a scouting party.
Kian looked at Andrew, who nodded.
“According to what you told Peter, I assume five females and twenty-one males?”
“It’s not as neatly divided as the birth rate. The original group had three females and seventeen males. The other six were born to pure-blooded mothers.”
“So the children born to the females are considered pure-blooded?” William asked.
“They are pure-blooded because their fathers are also pure-blooded. The females don’t take human lovers. They are too weak and offer no challenge.”
That would explain their Dormant problem. If Emmett’s people were genetically similar to the gods, then the children born from unions between human females and hybrid fathers might not carry the immortal gene at all. But hybrid mothers and human males should produce them.
Except, how had Mey and Jin been conceived?
“So let me get this straight.” Kian uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “Only the males dally with human females, and the children born to them are like you, hybrids who have some of the pure-bloods’ powers and longevity. Have any female hybrids been born?”
Emmett nodded. “Two that I know of. The pure-blooded males might have taken women outside of the compound.”
That wasn’t good. “Are you telling me that there might be hybrids out there who don’t know how they came to be?”
Emmett nodded. “It’s possible.”
“Did you encounter any?”
“No, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.”
“Did those two female hybrids have children?” Kian asked.
“Not while I was there. They were still young.”
Given the scarcity of females, Kian doubted that the hybrid females were even allowed to mate with humans. They were most likely taken by the pure-blooded males, and it was doubtful that the hybrid males were allowed access to them.
Besides, in their society, the females chose their partners, and it made sense that the female hybrids preferred the pure-blooded males who could give them long-lived children. The hybrid males might not.
If the pure-blooded females didn’t care that the males in their shared harem mated with humans, they probably didn’t mind them mating with the hybrids either. It would be interesting to find out whether those unions produced long-lived children or not.
As Emmett shifted in the armchair, his chains rattled. “Can we take a break? I need to use the bathroom, and I’m also hungry.”
“You ate lunch an hour and a half ago,” Arwel said.
“I told you that I need blood to supplement my nutritional needs. You didn’t believe me.”
“I’m not going to drag a female in here so you can snack on her.”
“Who said anything about a female? Animal blood would do. It just needs to be super fresh. Otherwise it loses most of its nutritional value. You can get it in a Chinese market, and it doesn’t even cost much.”
As Kian imagined Emmett gulping down blood from a cup, bile rose in his throat. Not that he had a problem with the guy consuming it. Morally, there wasn’t much difference between eating animal flesh and drinking its blood, but for someone who chose to be vegan and had abstained from animal products for over a century, it was nauseating.
Arwel looked at him with a raised brow. “Should I get it for him?”
“I don’t see why not. I just don’t want to be here when he enjoys his snack.” Kian pushed to his feet. “Tell Alfie to get it for him. We will take a break and return in an hour.”
24
Eleanor
“What’s the matter?” Vivian asked when Eleanor emerged from her room.
It was nearly noon, but she hadn’t slept much.
Greggory hadn’t called, hadn’t come over to apologize, and she’d spent the night either raging or crying.
“Nothing.” She walked over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup.
“You look upset. Did something happen with Greggory yesterday?”
There was no point in denying it. Pretty soon, it would become common knowledge that they were no longer together.
“He’s a caveman jerk. I told him about what happened with Emmett, and he threw a tantrum as if I cheated on him. The guy didn’t even cop a feel, and even if he did, it would have been against my will. Talk about blaming the victim.” She leaned against the counter and took a sip of the lukewarm coffee. “Blah.”
“I’ll brew a fresh one for you.” Vivian took the carafe and emptied it in the sink. “Maybe Greggory just needed time to process it. You should talk to him.”
“He knows how to reach me. I wasn’t the one who stormed out of the house and left him behind.”
Vivian arched a brow. “He did that?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you think? I left. I wasn’t going to wait around for the jerk.”
“Perhaps he’s embarrassed to call you after that childish tantrum.”
Eleanor shook her head. “I’m not going to call him if that’s what you’re suggesting.”
Vivian sighed. “Do you love him?”
“I don’t know. Right now, I want to strangle him.”
“The line between love and hate is thin. Both are extreme emotions, and love can easily turn to hate when the person you love hurts your feelings. But you’re not a kid, Eleanor. You are a mature woman. Call him, talk to him, and find out where you stand with him. If he can’t handle what happened to you on the mission, then he’s not the right guy for you.”
“That’s precisely my conclusion. But you’re right. I shouldn’t leave things hanging in limbo.”
Eleanor put her cup down and headed to her room to get her phone, but not to call. She was too angry to affect a calm tone, and she refused to give Greggory the satisfaction of letting him know how much he’d hurt her feelings.
Instead, she fired a quick text. Meet me at the café in half an hour. We need to talk.
“Did you call him?” Vivian asked when she came back to the kitchen.
“I texted him.”
“Did he answer?”
Eleanor had heard the ping of an incoming message but had been too chicken to take a look. If he answered with a screw you, she would start breaking things.
Pulling the phone from her jeans back pocket, she glanced at the screen. His answer was one word. Okay. That didn’t sound promising. If he was sorry about the way he’d reacted, he would have put it in the message.
“Jerk.”
“What did it say?” Vivian asked.
“It said, okay. No, I’m sorry for acting like a jerk, or I miss you, or I still love you.” She gripped the phone tightly to stop the impulse to hurl it at the wall.
Shaking her head, Vivian poured the freshly brewed coffee into a clean mug and handed it to Eleanor. “I wonder if hi
s past colored his reaction. The Doomers don’t have much respect for women. They think of them as possessions.”
“Greggory is not like that.”
Eleanor hated it that she still felt the urge to protect him, but she didn’t want Vivian to have the wrong idea about him or about their relationship. She wasn’t some pushover that would have tolerated even a hint of disrespect.
“Maybe you don’t know him as well as you thought you did. After all, most of your relationship was long-distance. It’s easy to put your best face forward for a little while, and especially over the phone.”
Eleanor rolled her eyes. “Apparently.”
“You’ve only had a few days of actually being together.”
That was so true.
A guy who threw in the towel at the first bump in the road wasn’t built for anything long term. Life wasn’t a smooth path, and someone who couldn’t handle the ups and downs was not a good candidate for anything meaningful.
In fact, he wasn’t a good candidate even for a fling.
If Greggory had known the full story, his anger would have been justified, and she would have forgiven him for being pissed and storming out. After all, she’d been attracted to Emmett, and not all of what had transpired between them had been forced on her. But he hadn’t even given her a chance to tell him, and if he was reacting like that to the PG version of the story, she probably shouldn’t tell him the PG-13 part.
He might become violent.
25
Kian
Kian pulled a napkin from the dispenser and started on the dust covering the conference table in his old office. Okidu cleaned the place about once a month, but it must have been many days since he’d been there.
Andrew pulled out another napkin and started on the other end. “William, how about you invent something that can clean dust automatically? The clan could make millions on a device like that.”
Chuckling, William drew out a chair and sat down. “Only until the Chinese get their hands on it, reverse-engineer it, and start selling it at half the price.”