His lips pressed into a firm line. “I’m afraid, in my current condition, I could lose you. Your blood’s no longer in my system. If you were to find a car or ... an airplane...” A knot formed in his chest. He swallowed against the hard lump in his throat. “Now is the time to tell me if you want to go. I can make arrangements so I ... wouldn’t be able to follow.”
Her frown deepened. “And what would happen if I chose to leave and you couldn’t find me.”
His jaw tightened and his gaze skated away from hers. “My humanity would deteriorate. It wouldn’t take long. The need to find you would consume me. I’d become incensed by my instinct to survive, but I’d make sure you were safe from me. Then the Council would put me down and you’d be free. It would all be over. No more pain. No more us.”
Her breathing quickened. “There has to be some other way to help you.”
“There isn’t.”
“But they’ll kill you.”
He shook his head. “It’s not murder. It’s duty. And, if I surrender, it will be merciful. It’s mercy. I’m past the point of choosing my own destiny. It’s been decided, all except for this last part. I’m reliant on others, forced to beg this of you—or them. But I can’t save myself.”
“How do you know? Has anyone ever tried?”
“Anna, if I were free, I’d hunt you. With or without your blood, I’d find you again and again. Only, my appetite would be insatiable, my eyes blind, and my heart consumed by bloodlust. The man I am would die regardless and what remained would be more beast than man.”
Her chin trembled as her eyes shimmered behind a fresh wall of tears, her voice small and weak with fear. “You swore you’d never hurt me.”
“I would never let it come to that. I intend to keep my promise, which is why I plan to let you go and surrender my life to the Council, if that’s what you choose.”
“But if I give you my blood that won’t happen?”
“The calling... It starts an internal clock that can only be stopped by bonding. Your blood adds time, but the longer we wait, the less and less time it buys us.”
Twin tears tumbled past her lashes. “This is too big of a decision for me to make. You’re asking me to give up my life for yours.”
“Your human life. I would give you immortality. No matter what, Anna, our souls are eternally locked as one. If I die, your mortality will eventually run out and we’ll find each other again.”
“How?”
“Do you not believe in an afterlife?”
“No. I believe in science.”
He frowned and pressed his lips tight. “I see.” He couldn’t force his beliefs on her, so he let that argument go. “You don’t need to make a decision now.”
Her gaze cut to him. “You’re suffering.”
“We’re all suffering. The heart is an incredibly human organ, delicate and systemically dramatic. But I can abide the pain.” He could bear almost anything for her.
“You forget that I can sense it. It’s radiating from you, Adam. And when we touch it’s stronger. More of an actual feeling than an instinct. I don’t know how that’s happening.”
“It’s because we’ve emotionally bonded. My empathy is one of my strongest gifts. It makes sense that it would be the first one my soul shared. Not all mates communicate emotions as easily as we seem to.”
His brow tightened, wondering how much she actually felt. They seemed to share a ricocheting vibration, but not an actual translation of units of pain.
“Can I try an experiment?” he asked, shifting her to sit up on his lap.
“What do you want to do?”
He slid a straight pin from the band of her apron. “I’m going to prick my finger. I want you to tell me what you feel?”
Her eyes focused on his finger and she nodded. He slid the point of the pin into his fingertip, past the callous of his fingerprint until it struck a nerve.
“I feel a tingling at the base of my neck.”
“Not your finger?”
“No. It’s more of a...” She frowned. “Sort of like when your stomach tells your brain it’s hungry. You know the signals more than the actual feeling of an empty belly—tiredness, irritability, lethargy—”
“Lust.”
“What?”
He removed the straight pin and placed it aside. “Take all of those symptoms and combine them with lust. When I hunger for your blood, it’s a physical need. My body wants more than sustenance from you, Annalise. It wants everything.”
Her eyes widened. “And now I feel that.” She pressed a hand to her front, just above her uterus. “Here.”
He pulled her other hand to his lap, showing her what she did to him. “And I feel it here.”
Her lips parted. “Adam...”
“It’s not anything you need to fear, Anna. I should have shown you, but you still had so much to learn about what I was. My bite would bring the opposite of pain.”