Page 49 of High Stakes

I nodded. “Yes.”

“Then why haven’t you? If I am destined to do such unspeakable things, why have you not driven the stake through my heart?”

“What makes you think I can?”

“You have many gifts that could aid you in the task. You can disappear at will. Your sight and hearing rival mine, and you can keep me out of your head when no other human is able. Worse than that, sometimes you have no scent, and sometimes... your scent is all I can smell until it drives me mad—” He stopped suddenly, his chest heaving against mine as he fought for control, his green eyes sparking with an emotion I was too afraid to name.

“What is it that drives you mad, Enoch?”

For a long moment, he didn’t answer.

“The way you turn it on and off. There are moments I can’t smell you, even when you’re standing right in front of me.”

I closed my eyes and pulled my scent into my pores.

He released a growl, stepping away from me and turning toward the castle. I pushed my scent outward. He whirled around and closed the distance between us in a flash, wrapping his arm around my back and pulling me flush against the length of his body. “And then there are times, like right now, when I can smell every single inch of you.”

My skin prickled under his gaze as a war raged in his eyes. It was like he didn’t know what to do with me, or how to handle me. The fact that he saw me as a formidable threat steeled my spine.

Achingly slowly, he leaned in. Enoch’s eyes never left mine as he drew closer and closer. “Please,” he begged. His lips hovered over mine. The slightest movement would have made them brush together.

My knees were weak and it wasn’t because I was sick, or because I’d traveled. It was because of him. I raked my fingernails up his arms.

A growl rumbled in his chest. “Say you don’t want this,” he breathed. “And I will leave you alone.”

I didn’t want to be alone anymore.

I closed the distance between us, pressing my lips to his.

His eyes fluttered closed at the same time his hand tightened on my back, crushing me against him. His lips moved.

Enoch tasted as delicious as he looked. His hands ran up my spine, one clasping the back of my neck as he deepened the kiss. I parted my lips for him. The tip of one of his fangs raked across the plump flesh of my lower lip and the scent of blood filled my senses. He’d nicked me.

Enoch ended the kiss, licking a smear of my blood from his lips. His brows furrowed. “Your blood has a very strange taste.”

I smiled. “It isn’t good?”

He shook his head, furrowing his brows. “No, it isn’t.”

Probably a side effect of one of Kael’s enhancements. I was suddenly glad he hadn’t figured out how to make my blood poisonous to vampires.

Enoch rested his forehead on mine. “Before you take the stake hidden in your dress and try to skewer me with it again, would you consider something?”

I wasn’t even thinking about staking him in that moment. I couldn’t think of anything but his lips, his eyes, the warmth of his arm, and the way his fingers were splayed on my back. I hadn’t considered killing him since I tried yesterday afternoon. At dinner, when the woman fed him—willingly and with respect and admiration, and I saw that he wasn’t a monster at all—things changed. I wasn’t sure I could raise the stake to him now.

“It depends on what you’re asking me to do.”

He eased his grip on me and I let go of his lapel and took a shaky step back. “Allow me to show you what is at stake if I die. Give me time to show you why my life is worthwhile.”

“And if in the end, your future atrocities outweigh the good from your life in this time?” I challenged.

Enoch swallowed and stepped forward, placing his large hand on my side, over the stakes strapped there. “Then I will not fault you for attempting to do what you came to do.”

“You’d let me kill you?”

“I couldn’t in good faith not fight to survive, Eve, but like I said, I would like to call a truce for a time to allow you to make a more informed decision. And perhaps so that I can persuade you to tell me more about what is to come, so that I can make better choices. Perhaps if we gain a better understanding of one another, we can affect change without resorting to violence.”

That was exactly what I’d been wondering—whether we could change the future by simply discussing it. If Enoch and his siblings could avoid ever making a vampire, our missions would be considered successes. We might not have staked our targets, but we would have saved the humans and made peace with the last three remaining Nephilim.