“Now can you see why we had to stay hidden all these years?” he whispered. He brushed her lips with his fingers, trailed them over the curve of her cheekbone, her jaw. “People hate what they can’t understand, what is different from themselves. They hate it and they want to eradicate it. Violence and intolerance are woven through the fabric of human nature like a scarlet thread.”
“My mother was human, and she wasn’t like that,” Jenna protested. “I’ve known a lot of people who aren’t like that. You can’t just keep this prejudice going from generation to generation—it’s holding the Ikati back. We’ll never be able to live in the open, we’ll never be able to advance if we can’t let go of the past.”
He smiled down at her. Moonlight found the slopes of his face and slid over his skin in pale cr
