Obediah asked, “Wrong? What’s wrong, Master?”
“Don’t be sad, Daddy,” Delilah cooed.
“It’s fine,” Uriel pushed the thought through the bonds. “All is well, my loves. Calm, calm, calm.”
They settled, and Uriel sniffed. He ran a hand through his hair and ignored the comforting hand Raphael placed on his thigh. His mentor’s fingers squeezed, and Uriel grudgingly accepted the strength offered. Only for a moment.
Riley said, “I woke in a bed that wasn’t mine.”
And as Riley spoke, laying the horrors of Hell on the table between them, Uriel’s heart shredded into pieces.
Chapter One
I stood and stared at the destruction around me. Glass sprinkled the ground like pinpricks of starlight. Red blossomed around my bare feet. My soles stung. I blinked once. Twice. The shattered mirror reflected fractured pieces of myself. A fragment of short curls here. A shard of brown irises surrounded by red there. I was a Picasso painting, splintered and split.
A large chunk of mirror lay at my feet. I crouched and picked it up. It bit into my palm, burning and sharp. I angled it, and my reflection stared back at me, shrouded in shadow from the single bulb that had survived the power surge. It flickered as the beast stared back at me.
“Riley?” Noel spoke from the doorway, voice strained.
One blink, and the monster faded into prisms of multicolor. I looked up. Noel stood in his pajamas, white sweatpants and a pink shirt. His ivory hair draped over his shoulders in a long curtain. Snow-white skin paled impossibly as his colorless eyes dropped to my hand clenched around the glass. Purple starbursts exploded around his pupils, darkening until his eyes were nearly black.
“Riley, what are you doing?” He sounded strangled.
Straightening, I glanced down, watching the blood from my palm drip, drip, drip onto the floor. I didn’t know how to answer him.
“Put the glass down,” he said. One socked foot shuffled over the threshold, but a dark arm wrapped around Noel’s waist, stopping him from entering.
“Your feet,” Jai said.
Noel looked as if he’d fight him for a moment, but he allowed Jai to guide him back into my bedroom. Then Jai stepped forward, black boots crunching over the glass.
His dark hair was longer now, and instead of his signature fauxhawk, he wore it tousled and messy. He’d kept his beard—it was groomed, neatly trimmed, but still longer than when I’d first met him. He hardly resembled the angel I’d found lying on my bed reading my book, but his dark, smoldering eyes were just the same. I missed the way they melted me when we kissed.
He surveyed the room, and flames ignited in his endless eyes. His jaw clenched, and his hands fisted. They tightened, then released. Tightened, then released.
Then he said, “Give me the glass, baby.”
It took an extra second for the command to reach my fingers, but they uncurled, revealing blood-slicked glass. Jai plucked it from my hand and set it on the bathroom counter. Stepping closer, he searched my face. Our frayed bond glowed for a moment. He tugged once, short but impatient. I dropped my gaze in shame.
“Sorry,” I said hoarsely. “I got mad again.”
Jai sighed. It was a weary sound. “Okay.”
Reaching for me, he scooped me up in his arms bridal style and carried me out of the bathroom. He transferred me to Noel.
He said, “I’ll get this cleaned up.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“I know.” Jai trudged back into the bathroom and retrieved a pair of tweezers from the drawer under the sink. He tucked them between Noel’s index and middle fingers. “Check his feet.”
Noel nodded, and Jai turned away, facing the destruction left in the wake of my temper tantrum.
As Noel carried me out of my bedroom and down the hall, I looped my arms around his neck and nuzzled his shoulder. He smelled like lilac and sunshine, with the subtlest hint of dokha, Jai’s Middle Eastern tobacco.
Had they shared a bed last night? Why did the thought make my heart hurt?
Our Utopian house was quiet as Noel meandered down the hallway. We’d moved in a few days after I was released from the hospital. There was no way I was returning to the earthly realm, and it had been glaringly obvious that the four of us wouldn’t fit comfortably in Jai and Noel’s Utopian apartment. Gideon’s studio was even smaller. So we’d upgraded to a single family house on the outskirts of the city center.
Upon moving in, they insisted I take the downstairs master bedroom with an ensuite bathroom. The guys slept upstairs. Jai and Noel’s rooms were across the hall from each other, and Gideon’s room was at the end of the hall. Downstairs, we had a small library that Gideon used as an office. The living room had a toasty fireplace, and the kitchen was spacious. The backyard was large and waiting on Gideon’s green thumb.
It was different from the apartment, but it was nice and homey. Most important of all, it was in Utopia where Lucifer couldn’t reach me. As long as I stayed here, I was safe.
The kitchen was empty as Noel plopped me on the island countertop. I was glad Gideon wasn’t here. When my anger erupted at the slightest provocation, Noel and Jai were nicer, but Gideon never let me get away with my temper tantrums.
Last week, I’d hurled my half-full dinner plate at the wall when Gideon and I argued about returning to school for the spring semester. I’d scared Noel half to death and pissed Gideon off something fierce. It was one of the first times he’d ever yelled at me, his voice booming and harsh, telling me to stop being a brat. His anger was horrible, but his disappointment was so much worse.
Yeah, I was glad he wasn’t home. Technically, he wasn’t on active duty—none of my angels were—but he still stopped by the Grand Hall often to help out and hound the councilmen for information on Lucifer’s whereabouts.
“Scoot back,” Noel said, and I obeyed, careful not to upend the fruit bowl in the center of the island.
With my bloodied feet propped on the edge of the counter, Noel scrutinized the cuts, tweezers poised in his grasp. He prodded at the shallow slices of flesh, picking out little shards of broken mirror. I barely flinched.
“What happened?” he asked.
Carefully, carefully.
I bit back the immediate impatient retort. They were always cautious around me now, ever since I’d returned from Purgatory almost a month ago. They treated me like I was fragile, and it annoyed me. They’d seen what I was capable of, but I was still weak in their eyes. A victim. Pathetic.
But I wasn’t! I refused to be. Never again would I be forced into vulnerable submission, cowering at the mercy of others. I was powerful and strong. I had killed and would most likely kill again. They treated me like I was still that naïve, innocent boy they’d known last year, but I would never be him again.
I didn’t think that was a bad thing. That boy was pitiful and sad. He was a doormat, letting anyone and everyone walk all over him because he didn’t have a clue. Was it so terrible to never be him again? I didn’t think so.
But I didn’t need to be cruel, so I swallowed the frustration that was nearly a constant thrum in the back of my head and said, “I got mad. I didn’t… it just happened.”
“What set you off?”