I reluctantly obeyed. My feet dragged with each step, but I moved closer to the men responsible for everything that had happened.
“Get on with it,” my father said.
The man nodded. “Case six-two-seven has been eating regularly and ingesting blood. We’ve upped her feeding by three hundred percent, but our nightly analysis shows that she is getting weaker. Our research and development team have even tried supplying her with our new trial of synthetic blood. It doesn’t appear to be making any difference. Her vampire side is nourished, but her demon side is…”
“She’s dying?” someone else asked.
My father stared pointedly at me. “Indeed. Look at her, she’s withering away. Starving.”
“Yes,” the scientist replied. “We hypothesize that at the current rate she’s going, she’ll be dead within a week, possibly sooner.”
My father wrinkled his nose, as if the news of my demise was distasteful. “Such a shame. Not that I’m surprised. She’s a bastard vampire from a weak mother, is she not?”
Fury shook in my hands. How fucking dare he?
I was about to open my mouth and spill the truth about exactly whose blood ran through my veins, but before I could, he stood up and grabbed his coat, placing it over his arm with dignified indignation before addressing his colleagues. “I have a meeting to attend. Let me know if she dies.”
And then he was gone. Flashed away, just like that.
No care or worry. No concern over his own flesh and blood. I was just as easily tossed away now as I’d been when I was an infant. Every time our lives intersected, it was always the same.
If I weren’t so exhausted and drained, a glimmer of pain at his words would have bounced within my chest. But the hunger I so desperately despised was my savior.
Fuck him. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being hurt or disabused. I wanted him to be nothing to me, as much as I was nothing to him.
So I took up all the shattered pieces of my pride and molded it together by focusing on my ravenous need.
But now I knew a startling truth. My father, the great Rylon Stiles, was involved with Spector. He was now responsible for ruining my life twice.
There was a time when I thought I needed to forgive my father for abandoning me and leaving me without a name or a purpose. Sometimes, the only way to move forward was to let go of the things that broke you down. I used to think that the only path to peace would involve forgetting the things my father had done. But I saw now, I would never matter to him, so why bother? I just got a tangible reminder of how deep his apathy for me went. Forgiveness and forgetfulness were for fools. Now, there was only revenge. Now, there was only my spider.
“So what do you suggest?” the other man boredly asked, as if my survival was inconsequential to him.
My spider hissed within me, breaking past my lips with venomous hatred. I brought my fingers up to my lips, surprised at the outburst when for so long she’d been silent.
“We know that she’s a black widow demon based on the hourglass mark on her throat and the webs she’s made. We’re hypothesizing that her demonic nature may need to feed through living entities, rather than through blood bags.”
“That’s the theory, anyway,” the man in the lab coat said.
My hand flew up to my throat, and I tried to feel for the mark they claimed I had. I did remember feeling intense burning pain at the ritual, but I had brushed it off as being burned from some of the fire that was lobbed around the room. Taking advantage of the expensive metal machines in the room, I padded toward them, ignoring the men who droned on. I stopped in front of the shiny stainless steel and leaned in, catching my reflection.
And...wow, okay. I didn’t look so hot.
My usually vibrant red hair hung in dull, tangled knots. My skin was so pale I looked sickly, and I had dark circles under my eyes, and my cheeks looked hollowed. But right there, in the dead center of the front of my neck, was a small red mark of a perfectly shaped hourglass.
So it was true. I really had become a black widow.
I was brushing my finger against the spot when the doors behind me suddenly opened. I turned to see a human male being shoved inside. He was handsome, with short dark hair and crisp brown eyes, probably in his late twenties, and there were steel cuffs wrapped around his wrists. His body writhed as he fought and searched the room for an escape, shivering as beads of sweat dripped down his face. He lunged for the doorway, but he was too slow. The door clicked shut, locking him inside with me.
My fangs dripped with venom at the sight of him while his fingers scrabbled along the cracks in the door, as if he could pry it back open. My spider rose to the surface, and I was helpless to stop the crashing vulturine appetite making every muscle in my body flex.
“We think she is a higher level demon that requires a different approach to feeding. She has predator-like tendencies, according to our tests. Let’s observe if a live feed is what she requires,” I heard the scientist say, but his droning words seemed like whispers against the roaring of my soul. More lure power was growing out of me like nectar for the bees.
The man finally turned to look, and when he saw that it was just me in the room with him, his panic faltered—but just for a moment. He may have seen a weak, small girl, but his intuition knew better. That was why, even as he stopped trying to get the door to open, his eyes were looking around wildly for another means to escape.
My body moved toward him like I was sleepwalking.
