Eyes closed, Gabe sucked oxygen into his parched lungs. His forehead rested against Aurora’s, and her orgasmic scream echoed in his mind.
His name.
She’d screamed his name as she had come.
She was soft and warm, and her legs still entrapped him in her silken embrace as they lay on his bed in the early hours of the following morning. A thread of unease drifted through his sated mind. How many times had he taken her? Why did he find her so irresistible, even now, seconds after climax?
He should be craving distance. Feel suffocated by her lingering touch. Hadn’t he tried to convince himself that the only reason he was so obsessed with her was because it had been so long since he’d had a woman?
It was no longer a convincing argument. Had it ever been?
He enjoyed her company. Even before they’d had sex. In the short time they’d been together, he’d got used to having her here.
Used to the way she’d turned his life upside down.
Her eyelashes flickered. She looked enchanting and exhausted and guilt ate through him. But all she had to do was look at him and he wanted her. As though he was trying to create as many memories as possible.
Because their time together was so inevitably brief.
Silence settled around them, an elusive illusion of comfort, as she slipped into sleep. And only then did he realize their fingers were entwined.
Much as he wanted to remain here with her, he had to work. With a heavy sigh, he eased his fingers from hers.
She stirred, frowned, and momentarily tightened her grip on him. “My beloved archangel.”
The words were soft, sleep-drugged, and a shudder crawled along his spine at her whispered endearment.
My beloved archangel. Only Eleni had ever called him that. Only she had ever dared.
Only Eleni had ever possessed the right.
Fascination and dread-filled hope thundered through him as he stared at Aurora’s sleeping face.
It wasn’t possible. He knew that. Eleni was dead, and dead forever. She could never return.
Aurora’s words meant nothing.
They meant everything.
He raked his hand through his hair and gripped the back of his neck. It didn’t shift the crazy thoughts pounding through his head.
Why did she possess a necklace so similar to the one he had once given to Eleni?
Stop. There was no connection between Eleni and Aurora. He couldn’t risk traveling that path, clinging to a dream, when he knew, in his heart, it could never be.
But what if it was more than a dream?
There was only one other he could talk to about this. Only one other who could truly understand.
Zad.
It didn’t take long to track him down. He was knee deep in the latest devastating earthquake that had recently hit the Pacific.
Gabe stood on a bank of steaming rubble and watched the other archangel, second only to Mephisto in age, leave the medical team he’d been organizing and make his way across the broken landscape toward him.
“Is it worth it?” Gabe narrowed his eyes against the gritty atmosphere and surveyed the ruined city. Zad haunted natural disasters on Earth as if they were a drug.
“Got to be worth a try.”
They’d had similar conversations a million times in the past. As far as Gabe was concerned, humans could just get the hell on with it. Somehow or another their species always survived, no matter what the Earth or cosmos threw at them.
They survived. Whether they deserved to or not.
Strange. He and Zad had both lost those who meant everything to them. Yet while Gabe had turned his back on humanity, Zad had embraced them.
Gabe would never again open his arms to the human race.
Aurora’s face filled his vision, obliterating the ravaged land. She was a human, and he’d done far more than merely open his arms to her. He’d broken ancient covenants for her.
But then, she wasn’t wholly indigenous to Earth. She was a unique, incredible hybrid who possessed the genetic material from two dimensions. He would never lay the blame of the past on her shoulders.
Yet he’d saved her before he’d known her true heritage.
Again, the futile hope that she was so much more than she could ever be echoed through his heart. It would be the answer for his insatiable desire, and the reason he craved her company.
“Is this about the woman you rescued from the Guardians?” Zad’s voice dragged him back to the present.
“Yes.”
“It’s no longer an inconvenience having her on your island.” It wasn’t a question. “The sex must be spectacular.”
“It’s not the—” He clamped his jaw shut. Zad was the last one he’d discuss his sex life with. “She had a necklace. It’s an exact replica of the ones we gave our beloveds. And do you know why she has it? Because she used to dream of archangel wings and rainbows as a child. She had it commissioned to her specific design.”
Zad gazed into the distance, his hands shoved into the pockets of his dusty jeans. Was Zad even going to acknowledge his words?
Finally, the other archangel turned to him, his face an inscrutable mask.
“It doesn’t mean anything. Children throughout the ages, throughout the universe, dream of rainbows and archangels for no other reason than both are”—he shrugged, and a mirthless smile tugged at his lips—“fantastical.”
Gabe forcibly relaxed his clenched fists. A buried sliver of sanity in a dark corner of his mind urged him to shut up, to leave, to forget about this madness.
But he couldn’t let it go. Not yet. Not while there was still the tiniest thread of hope in his heart.
“That’s not all. When she was asleep, she said—” The words lodged in his throat, burning. How could he repeat them, after so long? To anyone, but most of all to Zad, who had also loved Eleni?
Zad’s mahogany wings rippled in the breeze, and Gabe saw how his muscles tensed, and he understood. Because even after all this time, he, too, struggled against the instinct to soar to the mythical heavens.
“It doesn’t matter what she said.” Beneath his even tone, there was a harsh note of finality in Zad’s voice. “She’s not Eleni, Gabe. Neither first-generation Nephilim nor their descendants have souls to return to us. We’ve always known that.”
The knowledge was seared into the fabric of his being. The offspring of an archangel and a human, and all their descendants, was eternally damned. But still the irrational hope had flared that somehow, against every possibility and despite her Nephilim heritage, his Eleni had been reborn.
It was a fool’s dream. And while he was many things, he was no longer a fool. The necklace was a coincidence. There was no universal convergence, no karmic confluence.
Aurora hadn’t said she dreamed of archangel wings, after all. Aurora was not Eleni.
He would never have the chance to love her again, hear her laughter or hold her in his arms. Or be given a second chance to save her life the way he’d been unable to save her so many years ago.
“How long must we serve penance?” The words tore from him, bloodied chunks of his soul that would never heal.
“It’s not a sin to love again.” There was weary acceptance in Zad’s voice. “You’re not betraying Eleni’s memory.”
Gabe’s laugh was harsh, a mirthless sound in the arid air. Archangels rarely fell in love, and when they did, it was forever.
“You know we can have only one beloved.” The words ate into his heart like acid. “Like you said, it’s only spectacular sex.”
Zad finally turned to look at him, and Gabe saw fleeting desolation reflected in the other archangel’s dark eyes. “With the right one, sex heals the soul.”