Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Lowering himself down to a wooden chair, he arranged his robing with a precision that was not required. “You are my most precious possession.”
Inside the cage, the albino scorpion showed no reaction. Then again, she was used to him, and had turned to look at him as he had appeared in her window on the world.
She was not the only one of his collection that he had taken with him, but she was the most important—
You are better at caring for others than you wish to acknowledge.
“Shut. Up.”
And yet he could not deny the evidence of that truth. All he had to do was think of those glass cages back in his private quarters and all his careful cultivation of the scorpions therein. For years.
Back when the Princess was alive, she had tasked him with the care and breeding of the arachnids with which she had been obsessed. The post had been titularly a demeaning one, intended to humble him for the disgrace that his bloodline had suffered at his sister Xhex’s behavior.
Indeed, following her forced departure, there had been a campaign against all of them, and there were none who went untainted by the degrading treatment. The immediate family had been most affected, but ultimately any who were related came under the pall—which was why he was so certain of Kurling’s ultimate intent. If the male could prove what Blade had been doing, and then brought back Blade’s head on a stick? Then the male might well rescue himself from the pall—or even be revered.
Rehvenge’s “new era” could only change so much.
“Old habits die hard, my love,” he said as he stroked the glass with his forefinger. “Do they not.”
The scorpion was tiny. Barely bigger than a wasp. And as he considered what was in her stinger, what he had engineered through careful breeding over the previous two decades, he reflected on his uncharacteristic attraction to Lydia.
He may fuck males. But he had always loved deadly females—and like his scorpion, that wolven was a killer.
Unlike Lydia, the arachnid could do something else.
For Daniel.
The ghostly entity had it correct, and he wanted to hate her for the prescient knowledge—in addition to the invasion into his privacy: Unfortunately, having had his interior debate revealed, he now could not ignore the dilemma he had been trying to force down into the basement of his consciousness.
As the keeper of the scorpions, he had been witness to how the Princess had used their venom for all kinds of things: Skin toning. Pain control. Pain infliction. Paralysis. She had had a strange obsession with the elixir, as she had called it, and she had had him test it on himself… and on others.
Of whom some had been humans.
The fact that he had ended up doing to those rats without tails what had been done to his sister had seemed like an appropriate karmic payback to the inferior species: There he was, tracking underground labs and destroying them—while he was experimenting on humans himself. That period in his life had not lasted very long, however. Rehvenge had taken out that triple-jointed female and all her sick perversions.
Which was what happened when you thought a male like that was a toy you could play with forever.
In the aftermath? Blade had stayed with the scorpions… and all the knowledge he had gained remained with him. Including that which he had regarded as wholly irrelevant.
Some of those humans had had cancer. That had been… cured.
As vampires and symphaths did not get the disease, there had been no benefit to the discovery—and he never would have believed then that that throwaway would mean something in his life.
Well, potentially mean something. That was devastating.
Picturing Daniel, so weak and ailing, Blade knew that he was running out of time to emerge as the hero he had no interest in being—and not in terms of delivering his cousin’s head on a stick as a show of revenge, which was what Lydia thought she needed from him.
Indeed, the future she wanted so badly with her mate was in his reach, and his alone.
“But what is in it for me?” he whispered to his scorpion. “Nothing.”
No, that wasn’t true.
Suffering. That was what he got in return, and as pain was a destiny through which he was already slogging, he rather held on to the notion that if that man of hers died, Blade might have a chance with the wolven. And God knew, he was more than willing to be patient and wait out her mourning.
A new mission, to replace the one with the labs that he had completed.
He infinitely preferred that future as opposed to living in a world where true love blossomed next to his heart’s gravestone.
“Fuck that,” he said bitterly.
A symphath’s first interest was always their own, but no male wanted that lonely outcome—and as he shook his head, he knew that he was not going to stray from his course. He had brought his favorite arachnid with him only because, having revealed himself to Kurling’s camera, his personal quarters might be in play, so to speak, and though losing some of the others would be unfortunate, he would not be devastated.