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He flashed me a wolfish smile full of straight, white teeth. “I’d love nothing more than to offer you those services, sweetheart, but if his angry looks don’t kill me…” He glanced at Jesse, then pointed at Roark. “His fists will.”

“Jesus fuck.” Roark braced an elbow on his knee, leaning forward. “Explain the services, ye long-winded cunt.”

Link laughed and rose to his feet, rubbing his knuckles beneath his nose. “You need ammo? I got a guy who makes shells, arrows, and blades.” He pointed at a dark-haired man across the room.

I’d left my guns in the mountains, along with the ultrasound and other cumbersome supplies, like spare boots and clothes. At the time, nothing had been more important than shedding the weight of my load and getting the hell out of those mountains.

“You have a toothache? He’s a dentist.” Link’s finger moved through the crowd of men as he spoke. “You want another ultrasound machine? Need a generator? Batteries? Fuel? Fucking hemorrhoid cream? I’ve got a gatherer. This guy right here can find anything. Need a hunter, a farmer, a mechanic, a cook? I’ve got those guys, too. Sewing, soap and candle making, masonry, alternative medicine, you name it, every man on this property has a skill. You know why?”

I stared at him in stunned disbelief.

He paced through the room, eying each man he passed with a critical expression. “I spent the last two years hand-selecting my crew. I required three things. First and foremost, he had to be a damned-good soldier. Two, he needed to bring a specialized skill. And three, his moral compass couldn’t, under no circumstances, deviate from mine. Why, do you think, would I go through all this trouble? Why would I care?”

As he walked a circuit around his men, they looked at him with reverence and respect. I felt a little of that awe, too, though the skeptic in me wondered if he was blowing smoke up my ass.

Darwin lay in a curled-up ball by the door, his head on his leg, his hackles at rest. Not a care in the world.

Then it dawned on me. Link was interviewing us. He’d goaded Roark to see how well the priest could fight. And he’d called Jesse a dark-alley killer to test our reactions. What did he do to the men who didn’t pass his tests?

I leaned back and wrapped my hand around Roark’s on my lap. He and Jesse sat so silently and motionless I couldn’t read them. If their hearts were racing as fast as mine, they were keeping that shit locked down.

Link painted a fantastical picture. His crew was small but highly valuable. Sharing those resources with us in exchange for something I would’ve done anyway was hardly a fair trade. I didn’t want to be indebted to anyone, especially someone I didn’t know.

“Farmers, trackers, cooks, and soldiers.” Link strode toward me, his eyes hard with conviction. “All twenty-one of us and our nymphs lived on a steamboat large enough to accommodate a hundred people, but I knew…I knew one day there would be something more. I didn’t know that something would have blond hair, yellow eyes, and perky tits, but the moment our nymphs jumped ship, I knew they’d found that something. You.”

Shit, that was heavy. I was just a woman, surviving like everyone else, who got the luck of the genetic draw. Or the unlucky draw, depending on how I looked at it. And Link was just a man, taking a colossal risk.

I met his eyes. “I get that the women upstairs were your women before it all went down and you feel protective of them. But you’re saying they weren’t your wives or girlfriends or sisters.”

He watched me wordlessly, giving me time to frame my thoughts.

“I mean, nymphs look like women, but they’re dangerously not. So why keep them on the boat? In your company? It seems an enormous risk to take.”

“Because nymphs are rare,” Link said. “Because if I set them loose, they might’ve died. And because I believed there was cure. I just had to be patient.”

Patient or crazy.

I let out a slow breath. “What happened to the two nymphs you lost?”

Link stared at the floor, his eyes frozen and unblinking. “They stumbled upon a camp of aggressive men in Alabama. We tried to corral them away, but Cora and Penny bit the men in self-defense.”

Fatal bites. My chest squeezed.

Jesse shifted beside me. “You didn’t lose any men out there tonight, did you?

Hands in his pockets, Link rocked on his heels. “Nope.”

I followed Jesse’s train of thought, which hurtled into the future, beyond the recovery of the women and establishing a safe place for them to live, whether it be in a fortified mansion or on a steamboat.

He was thinking about the protection we needed. Protection against threats that still awaited us. The cliff I’d yet to fall from. The pregnancy. The continual evolution of the aphids. The Drone.