Her memories were cloudy, but she remembered shredded wings, a bleeding face, hands that had held her protectively as they descended to the adamantine hardness of the city streets below. Her heart clenched. “Tell me something, Raphael?”
He was already turning, heading to the door. “What is it you’d like to know, Guild Hunter?”
She hid her smile at his slip. “What do I call you? Husband? Mate? Boyfriend?”
Stopping with his hand on the doorknob, he shot her an inscrutable look. “You can call me ‘Master.’ ”
Elena stared at the closed door, wondering if he’d been playing with her. She couldn’t tell, didn’t know him well enough to read his moods, his truths and lies. They’d come together in an agony of pain and fear, pushed by the specter of death into a union that might have been years in the making had Uram not decided to turn bloodborn and tear a murderous path through the world.
Raphael had told her that according to legend, only true love allowed ambrosia to bloom on an archangel’s tongue, to turn human to angel, but perhaps her metamorphosis owed nothing to the deepest of emotions and everything to a very rare biological symbiosis? After all, vampires were Made by angels, and biological compatibility played an integral part in that transformation.
“Damn it.” She rubbed the heel of one hand over her heart, trying to wipe away the sudden twist of pain.
“You intrigue me.”
He’d said that at the start. So perhaps, there was a component of fascination. “Be honest, Elena,” she whispered, running her fingers over the magnificent wings that were his gift to her, “you’re the one who fell into fascination.”
But she would not fall into slavery.
“Master, my ass.” She stared at the foreign sky outside the balcony doors and felt her resolve turn iron-hard—no more waiting. Unlike if she’d still been human, the coma hadn’t wasted away her muscles. But those muscles had gone through a transformation she couldn’t imagine—everything felt weak, new. So while she didn’t need rehab, she did need exercise. Especially when it came to her wings. “No time like the present.” Lifting herself up into a proper sitting position, she took a deep, calming breath . . . and spread out her wings.
“Christ, that hurts!” Teeth gritted, tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes, she kept stretching the unused, unfamiliar muscles, folding her new-formed wings in slowly before expanding them outward. Three repetitions later and the tears had soaked into her lips until the salt of them was all she could taste, her skin covered by a layer of perspiration that shimmered in the sunlight streaming in through the glass.
That was when Raphael walked back in. She expected an explosion, but he just took a seat in a chair opposite the bed, his eyes never leaving her. As she watched, wary, he hooked one ankle over a knee, and began to tap a heavy white envelope bordered with gilt against the top of his boot.
She held his gaze, did another two stretches. Her back felt like jelly, her stomach muscles so tight they hurt. “What’s”—a pause to draw breath—“in the envelope?”
Her wings snapped shut behind her, and she found herself leaning against the headboard. It took her several seconds to realize what he’d done. Something cold unfurled within the core of her soul even as he got up and dropped a towel on the bed, then retook his seat. No fucking way was this going to keep happening.
However, in spite of the turbulent fury of her anger, she wiped off her face and kept her mouth shut. Because he was right—she wasn’t his equal, not by a long shot. And the coma had messed her up some. But as of now, she was going to work on those shields she’d started to develop back before becoming an angel. There was a chance that—given the changes in her—she could learn to hold them for longer.
Forcing her rigid shoulder muscles to loosen, she picked up a knife she’d left on the bedside table and began to clean the pristine blade with the edge of the towel. “Feeling better?”
“No.” His mouth firmed. “You need to listen to me, Elena. I won’t hurt you, but I can’t have you acting in ways that bring my control over you in question.”
What? “Exactly what kind of relationships do archangels have?” she asked, genuinely curious.
That made him pause for a minute. “I know of only one stable relationship now that Michaela and Uram’s is broken.”
“And the Bitch Goddess is another archangel, so they were equals.”
A nod of his head that was more thought than movement. He was so damn beautiful that it made thinking difficult, even when she knew he possessed a vein of ruthlessness that was sewn into the fabric of his very soul. That ruthlessness translated into a furious kind of control in bed, the kind that made a woman scream, her skin too tight across a body that knew only hunger.
“Who are the other two?” she asked, swallowing the spike of gut-deep need. He’d held her since she woke, his embrace strong, powerful, and at times, heartbreakingly tender. But today, her body craved a far darker touch.
“Elijah and Hannah.” His eyes glittered, turning to a shade she’d once seen in an artist’s studio. Prussian. That’s what it was called, Prussian blue. Rich. Exotic. Earthy in a way she’d never have believed an angel to be until she found herself taken by the Archangel of New York.
“You will heal, Elena. Then I will teach you how angels dance.”
Her mouth dried up at the slumbering heat in that outwardly calm statement. “Elijah?” she prompted, her voice husky, an invitation.
He continued to hold her gaze, his lips at once sensual and without pity. “He and Hannah have been together centuries. Though she’s grown in power over time, it is said that she’s content to be his helpmeet.”
She had to think for a while about that old-fashioned expression. “The wind beneath his wings?”
“If you like.” His face was suddenly all hard lines and angles—male beauty in its purest, most merciless form. “You will not fade.”
She didn’t know if that was an accusation or an order. “No, I won’t.” Even as she spoke, she was vividly conscious that she’d have to use every ounce of her will to maintain her personality against the incredible strength of Raphael’s.
He began tapping that envelope again, the action precise, deliberate. “As of today, you’re on a deadline. You need to be on your feet and in the air in just over two months’ time.”
“Why?” she asked, even as delight bubbled through her bloodstream.
Prussian blue froze into black ice. “Lijuan is giving a ball in your honor.”
“We’re talking about Zhou Lijuan, the oldest of the archangels?” The bubbles went flat, lifeless. “She’s . . . different.”
“Yes. She has evolved.” A hint of midnight whispered through his tone; shadows so thick they were almost corporeal. “She’s no longer wholly of this world.”
Her skin prickled, because for an immortal to say that . . . “Why would she hold a ball for me? She doesn’t know me from Adam.”
“On the contrary, Elena. The entire Cadre of Ten knows who you are—we hired you after all.”
The idea of the most powerful body in the world being interested in her made her break out in a cold sweat. It didn’t help that Raphael was one of them. She knew what he was capable of, the power he wielded, how easy it would be for him to cross the line into true evil. “Only nine now,” she said.