Dawn of Eve

by Pam Godwin

“Neither do I.”

  I flinched, clutching my throat. “Do you love me?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  Acid burned in my stomach, heating my voice. “Would you die for me?”

  “That’s ridiculous. No one’s dying.”

  “It’s hypothetical, and you fucking know it. Answer the question.”

  “Eat.” He gestured at the spread of food and wine. “We’re going to be in here for five days. Plenty of time to talk.”

  “What? Traveling by car, we should make it to Alberta by tomorrow.”

  He leaned back on the cushion and tilted his head. “I don’t live in Alberta.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  My entire body turned cold, despite the electric heat wafting from some unseen vent in Salem’s ostentatious chariot.

  He doesn’t live in Alberta.

  He’d drawn a map for my fathers, indicating where I would be and how I would get there. He’d also told Michio nothing happened when he bit a hybrid. Pretended he couldn’t see or hear his glowing veins. Claimed he never killed a hybrid child. Concealed his ability to move faster than hybrid fast. And sat in that prison with me for ten days, making guesses about the identity of our captors.

  All lies.

  Omissions.

  Deliberate fabrications.

  Why? Because he wanted to fuck me and protect me? Bullshit!

  “Where are you taking me?” My breath came fast and shallow, constricted by the damn corset pinching my ribs.

  “That’s the one thing I can’t tell you.” The frown that pulled at his perfect lips suggested he regretted his answer.

  He could choke on a dick. My chest heaved, and a sudden flush fevered my cheeks. I yanked off my fur cloak and tackled the hooks on the corset. I can’t breathe. Fuck, I need air.

  He knocked my hands away, swiftly unclasping the busk. “To protect those who live in my home, the location must remain a secret.”

  “To protect them or yourself?” I tossed the corset and rubbed a hand over the thin shirt to soothe my tender ribs. “It’s not the only thing you refuse to tell me.” Glaring at him, at the exposed strength rippling his chest and arms, I loathed his arrogant beauty and superiority. “Would you die for me?”

  He reclined beside me, stretched an arm across the cushion behind my shoulders, and tilted his head to look me directly in the eye. “No. I die for no one.”

  For all the pain shattering through my chest and burning up my throat, I was motionless. Composed, even. I’d needed to hear that response, and now I could process the situation from a detached standpoint, one that wasn’t craving his love with every beat of my heart.

  “Who are your friends?” I asked hollowly, numb.

  “They work for me.”

  I wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t the kind of man who followed orders. He commanded with all the power of a ruthless tyrant.

  Tears sparked at the backs of my eyes but didn’t catch. “Tell me about the mansion.”

  “You need to eat.” He set a plate of charred meat and potatoes on my lap.

  The knot in my stomach protested, but I needed mental and physical strength. Hunger would be counterproductive. I selected a cooling slice of meat, chewing and swallowing without tasting it.

  He mirrored my movements, eating from his own plate and savoring every bite with a satisfied look on his face. “I knew you would target the Yukon breeding facility before you led your soldiers there.”

  Made sense. It was the last nest in North America. But if he didn’t live in Alberta, how and when did he start tracking me?

  “So I set up a trap in the mansion.” He chewed, swallowed, and stared at his plate. “I orchestrated the chase that led you there. You killed a lot of my men.”

  “You killed Jeremy!”

  “The hybrid children killed him.”

  A bite of potato lodged in my tight throat. “Those men, the hybrids that chased me… They were infected. Mindless with hunger—”

  “They were acting. I’d removed their programming.”

  I thought back to the hybrids I’d encountered that day. The one that had called me Daughter of Eve right before I put an arrow through his eye. He could’ve attacked me and hadn’t. And the others that had fallen on top of me, pulling at my clothes. I’d been outnumbered, weaker, yet only one had bitten me. And I’d killed them.

  “The hybrids that chased me through the forest…” My chest squeezed. “They could’ve outrun my horse.”

  Why hadn’t I questioned that at the time? Maybe I did. So much happened that night.

  “They could’ve outrun you,” Salem said. “Could’ve slipped through the gate that circled the mansion. Could’ve killed you at any point. I’d instructed them to steer you toward me without harming you.”

  “Some of them died.” The twinge behind my ribs wasn’t regret. It was more complex than that. Confusion. Sadness. Anger.

  “They owed me their lives,” he said, without a hint of emotion.

  I shoved my plate at him, unable to eat any more. “Erebus asked you why I wasn’t dead yet. Do I owe you my life, too?”

  He set our food aside and propped his bare feet on the opposite cushion, crossing his legs at the ankle. “You’re different.”

  “How so?”

  “The plan has always been to eliminate you. My friends have tried for…” He pulled in a deep breath. “For a long time.”

  I tensed. “How long?”

  “Since you started leaving the dam without your fathers. When you created the Resistance and ran missions.”

  I was fifteen then. “They’ve tried to kill me for four years?” I asked incredulously.

  “You’re not an easy target. Always surrounded by soldiers or locked behind walls.”

  “Because every hybrid on the planet has a hard-on to fuck me, bite me, or kill me.” I narrowed my eyes. “In light of your super superhuman speed, you could’ve blinked past my defensive line or slipped into my camp while I slept, tore out my throat, and flashed away before anyone saw you.”

  “I tried.”

  My heart shriveled, the pathetic miserable thing.

  “Do you remember the nest you took out near the Oregon coastline?” he asked quietly.

  I curled my fingers on my lap. “It was one of my first missions.” My brows pulled together. “We didn’t run into any problems. I had a lot of soldiers back then.”

  “Fifty soldiers. You camped in a deserted parking lot that night.”

  “In an old gas station.”

  He nodded. “Your army stood watch, protecting their precious leader while she slept inside. Alone.”

  “You were there?” My fingernails stabbed into my palms.

  “I knelt over you in the back room of that building, prepared to end the prophecy that kept my friends in a constant state of restlessness. I’ll be honest, Dawn. I didn’t give a fuck about the war. Still don’t. I’m happily oblivious in the protection of my home. But back then, I was still trying to build a place for myself, with people I trusted—”

  “Hybrids.”

  “Hybrids I’d freed. And they were uneasy with you roaming the planet. They saw your missions as a sign. The coming of the prophecy. Your mother ended aphids with a thought when she became pregnant. What is your trigger, and how will you wipe out the hybrids? As long as you’re alive, you’re a threat. But their attempts to kill you ended in failure.”

  “You decided to deal with it.” My voice strangled. “Except you didn’t.”

  “I couldn’t.” He leaned closer, so close he stole my air. “I felt this.”

  The connection between us ignited in my chest, shooting electricity along an obscure line, fusing us together on a level that transcended physical space. His eyes heated, his fangs lengthened, and for a moment, I thought he might grab my neck and devour me. Would I try to stop him? The violent need to pull him closer was an instinctual craving in my gut.

  His breaths quickened as he watched me, as if his te
nuous control combated his desire to fuck me and bite me.

  “You can feel this thing?” I waved a hand over the charged space between us, unsure what to call it. “I feel it, too, yet on your end”—I flattened my palm against his hard-packed chest—“it’s closed off.”

  He jerked away and dragged his hands down his face, his shoulders slumping forward. “I don’t know why you’d think I’m closed off, because I feel the connection lighting up my fucking insides.” He seemed to realize his posture contradicted his claim and sat straighter, chest open, and arms at his sides. “It’s the reason I spared your life in that gas station. And why I didn’t kill you in the basement prison.”

  My entire body started to pull toward him, missing the connection, needing it back.

  Don’t fall for it. He’s a world-class liar.

  “Then why set the trap?” I shoved my hair out of my face and leaned in, shaking with anger. “Why go through all the trouble of capturing me? Walking me back to my camp like a doting boyfriend?” My voice rose to a shriek. “Hanging out with my fathers like we’re one big happy fucking family?”

  “Are you done?”

  “No! I will never get over the embarrassment of giving my virginity to such a mendacious, secretive, poisonous snake. You’re a frontal lobe disorder, and you have all the appeal of a lobotomy. But you need one, seeing how your emotional and social struggles are placing a demand on you. Do you live to appease your friends? Is that why I’m here? Is my death still on the menu? Are you procrastinating the bloody finale? Or maybe you want to get your dick wet a few more times before you rip out my throat?”

  In a speed too fast to perceive, he yanked me beneath him, chest to chest, with a hand on my throat and his hips between my thighs. “I could’ve fucked you the moment I tranquilized you in the mansion. What I told you in the cave was the truth. You made me care about you. Fucking you just to fuck you no longer mattered. I wanted you to trust me then, and I still do.”

  I shoved my throat against the collar of his hand, every muscle in my body straining with the heave of my breaths. “Why didn’t you just tell me the truth? That’s how you win a person’s trust, you shit-spouting sod!”

  “The truth wouldn’t have brought us here,” he seethed, tightening his hold on my neck. “Your fathers would’ve killed me, and the mystery behind our connection would’ve been lost forever.”

  “So here we are, back to you saving your own life and destroying mine. Why didn’t you just take me from the mansion?”

  “I wanted to meet your fathers.” His fingers twitched against my throat. “I wanted to see if Michio could tell me anything about my genetics. I like them, Dawn. And knowing they’re not looking for you while I transport you home is a bonus.”

  My fathers believed I was free, doing my thing. They weren’t worrying, at least not more than usual.

  I deflated beneath Salem, all my steam used up in that pointless explosion of rage. I was spent, crushed, with nowhere to go. No match for two-hundred pounds of inhuman strength.

  He must’ve sensed the tension leaving my body, because he released my throat and moved his hands to my head, bracing his weight on his elbows.

  “It wasn’t just our connection that hypnotized me when we were fifteen.” He stroked my hair, his gaze following the movement. “I watched you sleep for hours in that old gas station. Your red hair slipped through my fingers like fire, your skin warm and soft to the touch. I longed to see the legendary gold of your eyes. You were so young, yet you looked terrifyingly fierce and radiant, even in sleep, as if you’d somehow harnessed the sunrise and wrapped it around you.”

  An ache sparked behind my eyes, my throat swelling with conflicting emotion. He’d touched me? Watched me? And hadn’t killed me.

  “I almost took you that night.” His face tightened, sharpening his cheekbones. “I didn’t have a safe place to keep you. So I left just before dawn.” His fingers clenched in my hair. “That was the dawn that burned the color from my eyes.”

  I trembled beneath him, warring with the desperate need to wrap my arms around him. Instead, I grasped for a reason to push him away. “You shot the dart that sedated me after Jeremy was decapitated.”

  “Yes.” His expression hardened. “I carried you to the basement.”

  “You were never drugged? What about the night we were released?”

  “Erebus waited for my signal. Three bangs on the door, followed by my order to let me out. One of my guards accompanied me while I carried you thirty miles from the mansion so that he could make the tracks in the snow that led north.”

  I closed my eyes. The message Salem had said he was given—Fuck the daughter of Eve and you’ll be freed—was just one more lie in an arctic hell of lies. After everything he’d told me, I wasn’t surprised, but I couldn’t stop the betrayal from constricting my heart.

  “What was the purpose of the hybrid children?” I met his crystal gaze. “Killing them goes against the hybrids’ instinct to reproduce.”

  “Erebus took them from the breeding facility. I suspect he used them to scare you, but it wasn’t part of the plan.” His jaw flexed. “I didn’t know he would bring them down there, so I killed the creatures to let him know what I thought about that.”

  Holy fuck. “Will he retaliate? How much control do you have over your friends? If they want me dead—?

  “No one will touch you.” Eyes ablaze with hellfire, they burned with enough promise to melt my insides.

  I stared at him in stunned turmoil as he lowered his head and licked my mouth. Our lips brushed, and that simple touch shoved me off-balance. My traitorous body vibrated on the edge of insanity, my hands locked at my sides through no force but my own.

  I was too emotionally weak to push him away, every part of me longing for the man I’d fallen in love with. The man who listened to my childhood stories, carried me fifty miles in a blizzard, and praised my skill with a bow. The man who touched me with protective familiarity.

  His mouth was wet silk, his breath warm and intoxicating. He didn’t hurry to deepen the kiss. He sampled and tested, every flick of his tongue deliberate, coaxing, intended to seduce. The iron length in his pants jabbed against my hip, but he didn’t grind or thrust, his muscles clenched with restrained hunger.

  I returned the kiss with vigor, rocking against him and gasping as heat flooded below my waist and lower. I needed…

  He was a manipulator, a lord of seduction. He would lure me with his sinful tongue and pacify me with his cock. Then what?

  I tore my mouth away. “You said you’d send letters to my fathers.”

  “Write the letters, and I’ll have them delivered.” A renegade smile stole across his lips, and his fingers slid through my hair, gripping gently, possessively.

  “For how long? I told them I was only staying three months.”

  His quicksilver eyes turned to stone. “You never mentioned that.”

  No, I hadn’t. I flashed my fangs in a humorless smile.

  “We’ll rectify that.” His voice deepened to an authoritative masculine rasp. “When the time comes, you’ll write them and tell them you’re staying.”

  “For how long?” I repeated the question with a growl.

  “Forever.”

  “What?” My heart slammed against my ribs. “You can’t keep me from them.”

  “I can do whatever I want.”

  With a surge of panic, I shoved at his chest. For a flickering second, I thought I’d actually moved him. The heat of his body vanished, replaced with a sweep of cold air. Before I realized what was happening, he’d stripped us both of our pants and impaled his cock between my legs.

  My head fell back on a soundless scream, my mind chanting objections while my body liquefied beneath his ruthless thrusts. I tried to mentally pull away. The slapping wet sounds were just two people fucking. The electric tingles in my chest meant nothing. He was nothing.

  But he was in me. His tongue in my mouth, his cock in my pussy, his soul in my ch
est, and his eyes locked on mine. He was a fiery spark in a cold dark place. Burning, consuming, and violent with passion. He rode me into the cracks of the cushions, grinding my shoulder blades against the metal floorboard, and never looking away.

  My struggling was pointless. I tried to bite him, but his reflexes were faster, always more agile. He maneuvered around my fangs as fluidly as he drew my pleasure, pounding me with endless energy and eating at my mouth with aggressive abandon. He grunted through labored breaths, his hands caressing and gripping.

  Then his fangs flashed, and he bit my throat, reopening the marks that were always there. His marks.

  I continued to fight, but at some point, my hips started working with him instead of against him. I grew frantic, urgent, bucking and crying out, controlled by delusional love and seeking release.

  The moment his thumb rolled my clit and our eyes reconnected, my pussy contracted, raging with a burst of sensations that overtook my body. I came so hard I lost my voice. He plunged in deep and froze, his cock swelling and spurting inside me, hands cupping my face, and pupils dilating in a sea of molten glitter.

  As we lay in a breathless pile of boneless limbs, my muscles twitched with the remnants of adrenaline and ecstasy. I hated myself for not being strong enough to resist him. I hated him for turning my body against me. I hated him for lying to me. For twisting our connection into something I resented. For killing Jeremy and letting my soldiers die. But I hated him the most for instilling in me the fear that I’d never see my fathers again.

  The following days cultivated my hatred. He seduced me over and over, a master tempter toying with my wounded soul. He never had to force me. He was too good, and I was weak and disgusting. He fucked me until my insides chafed and my blood sang. Then we ate, and he fucked me again.

  The convoy made a couple stops each day. The trucks were refueled. Our food was swapped out, and I was blindfolded, stripped, and taken outside to relieve myself. Nudity made me less inclined to run, but the purpose was hygiene. Constantly coated in the scent of sex, Salem bathed us both regularly, standing beside the truck with a cloth and container of warm water, permeating the air with the aroma of vanilla musk. I doubted he let anyone see me naked, but I didn’t know. With my eyes veiled, I listened for familiar sounds, hints of my location. The only clue was the gradual rise in temperature. We were heading south. Far enough south that coats weren’t needed in the winter.