4
Her brain blanked for several seconds. When she could speak, it came out a breathy moan. “You’re trying to kill me.”
A squeeze of her breast, the skin so tight the pleasure was almost pain. “It’s a much better form of punishment than tearing you limb from limb.”
“Can’t have sex with a dead woman, huh?”
“Precisely.”
Flames licked along her spine as he stroked both hands downward, sweeping his thumbs over the taut flesh of her buttocks. “Half the time, I’m not certain if you’re being serious or not.”
His fingers paused in their sensual torment. “Are you sure you wish me to know that? It’s a weakness.”
“Someone’s got to take the first step.” Lifting her foot, she ran it up behind his calf.
A kiss pressed to the beat of the pulse in her neck. “Such honesty will not serve you well among angelkind.”
“What about with you?”
“I’m used to utilizing what I know to maintain power.”
Elena leaned her chin on her hands, letting him ease the knots along the edges where her wings grew out of her back. It felt exquisite—so good she knew she’d never let another man touch her there, even in friendship. It would be a betrayal. “You’re being pretty honest yourself.”
“Perhaps between us,” he said slowly, as if considering the matter, “it may not be a weakness but a strength.”
Surprised, she turned her head. “Really? Then tell me something about yourself.”
He pressed his thumb into a particularly tight spot and she moaned, dropping her head onto her hands. “Lord have mercy.”
“It’s not the Lord you should be asking for mercy.” His tone held a possessive undercurrent that was becoming intimately familiar. “What would you like to know?”
She picked the first thing that came into her mind. “Are your parents still alive?”
Everything froze. The temperature of the water dipped so fast, she gasped for breath, her heart kicking out in panic. “Raphael!”
“Again, I must apologize.” A breath of heat against her neck, the water warming until her skin was no longer in danger of turning corpse-blue. “Who have you been talking to?”
The water might’ve warmed, but his voice remained an Arctic breeze. “No one. Asking about parents is a fairly normal activity.”
“Not when it’s my parents you’re asking about.” He pressed his body flush against hers, his arms coming around her waist.
She had the strangest feeling he was seeking comfort. It was such an odd thought to have about a being who held within him a power so vast, she could scarcely comprehend it, but she didn’t hesitate to put her arms around his, trusting him to hold her upright in the water. “I’m sorry if I opened old wounds.”
Old wounds.
Yes, Raphael thought, breathing in the scent of his hunter, the wildness barely contained beneath her skin. He’d wondered what Elena would do to a race of immortals—this mortal who’d made him a little bit human even as she became immortal. But he’d never stopped to wonder what she’d do to him.
“My father,” he said, surprising himself with the words, “died a long time ago.”
Flames everywhere, his father’s scream of rage, his mother’s tears. Salt on his lips. His own tears. He’d watched his mother kill his father and he’d cried. He’d been a boy, a true child, even among angelkind.
“I’m sorry.”
“It was an eternity ago.” And it was only in those rare moments when his shields fell that he remembered. Today, Elena had caught him unawares. His mind had flooded with the last images he had, not of his father but of his mother, her delicate feet walking lightly over grass stained with her own son’s life-blood. She’d been so beautiful, so gifted that angels had fought and died for her. Even at the end, as she crooned over Raphael’s fallen, broken body, her beauty had outshone the sun itself.
“Shh, my darling. Shh.”
“Raphael?”
Two feminine voices, one pulling him into the past, the other into the present.
If there had been a choice, he’d made it a year ago in the skies above New York, as the city lay in ruins around him. Now, he pressed his lips to the curve of Elena’s shoulder and soaked in her warmth, warmth that was distinctly mortal, melting the ice of memory. “You’ve been in this water long enough I think.”
“I don’t ever want to move.”
“I’ll fly you back.”
Her protest was weak as he lifted her out of the water, her body still so breakable.
“Don’t move, hunter.” Drying her wings with care, he pulled on his pants, then watched her dress, his heart overflowing with a mix of possession, satisfaction, and a terror unlike any he’d ever known before. If Elena fell from the sky, if she was thrown onto the unyielding earth, she wouldn’t survive. She was too young, an immortal just born.
When she came into his embrace, her arms going around his neck, her lips pressing to his pectorals, he shuddered and, closing his own arms around her, rose into the orange red glow of a sky skillfully painted by the rays of the slowly setting sun. Instead of going high, above the cloud layer, he stayed low, mindful that she felt the cold. If he’d known what they’d find, he’d have made a far different choice, but as it was, Elena saw the nightmare first.
“Raphael! Stop!”
He halted at the urgency in her tone, hovering just over the border that delineated where his territory ended and Elijah’s began. Even in the Refuge, there were lines—unmarked, unspoken, but existent all the same. One power could not stand too close to another. Not without destruction of a magnitude that would savage their kind. “What is it?”
“Look.”
Following the line of her arm, he saw a body colored in a hundred shades of copper by the sun. It lay in a small, silent square on his side of the border. His vision was acute, better than a raptor’s, yet he could see no movement, nothing that spoke of life. But he did see what had been done to the male. Fury ignited.
“Take me down, Raphael.” Distracted words, her eyes on the body that had curved in on itself as if in a desperate attempt to lessen the brutality of its injuries. “Even if there isn’t a vampiric trail to follow, I know how to track.”
He stayed in place. “You’re still recovering.”
Her head snapped up, those silver eyes liquid mercury. “Don’t you dare stop me from being what I am. Don’t you dare.” There was something very old in those words, in that anger, as if it had aged within her.
He’d taken her mind twice since she’d woken, both times to protect her from hurting herself. Today, those same primal drives urged him to disregard her orders—she might’ve been hunter-born, but she wasn’t yet anywhere near strong enough to handle this.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Elena said, taut pain in every word, “but if you take my mind, if you force me to go against my instincts, I’ll never forgive you.”
“I won’t watch you die again, Elena.” The Cadre had chosen her because she was the best, relentless in her pursuit of her prey. But then, she’d been disposable. Now, she was integral to his existence.