Chapter Ten

Nadya

I towel-dried my newly dyed hair from the box of color Carowyn had given me. She’d had an array of different shades to choose from in her cabinet. Plopping the towel on the bathroom counter, I jumped at the sight of myself. The midnight blue had come out more like a deep sapphire on my white-blonde hair. The intensity of the hue made my eyes gleam even brighter, casting an almost ethereal quality against my pale complexion. I suppose that fit since I was supposed to be a creature of the otherworld, like them.

Glancing at the raised scars along my arms and shoulders, knowing there were many more beneath the towel draped around my torso, I turned away from my reflection and dropped the towel to put on my robe. And to escape the constant reminder of my time in Ivangorod.

Deimos had been badly neglected the past few days, so I was surprised to find he wasn’t waiting on my bed when I left the bathroom.

“Deimos,” I called out, walking into the den when I recognized the charged presence of Uriel before I saw him. I’d said goodnight to him at the door, but apparently, he hadn’t left. Tightening the sash of my robe, I stepped farther into the room, my breath catching at the sight before the fire.

Uriel sat on the hearth rug, his long legs stretched out as he leaned back on one arm, his wings drooping low, and my black kitten curled on his lap purring while Uriel stroked him with two fingers. Watching with surprise and affection, I couldn’t stop staring at the long stroke from my kitten’s crown down along his spine where he’d crook his fingers to curl around his tail, then start again.

“I wanted to talk to you.” His honeyed baritone in the silence made me flinch. He continued petting Deimos, keeping his gaze down.

“All right.” I sounded remarkably steady, as if it was completely normal for me to have an archangel sitting on my living room floor at bedtime, petting my kitten.

Carowyn’s warning swirled in my head, but I told myself she had to be wrong. Uriel wasn’t a creature who sought earthly pleasures or human relationships. Even if there was this tugging in my sternum, it meant nothing. And if it did, I couldn’t allow myself to take that risk, to let him see what I was reduced to as Vladek’s woman. The shame was still too great. Like a pin in a butterfly’s wing, it kept me forever bound to the dark memory of him. I’ve tried to free myself, but all I do is flap and flounder, tearing my wings to pieces.

Stepping around the chair, I took a seat on the sofa, smoothing the robe to be sure my legs were covered.

“I was thinking about where we’ll be going and—”

He’d lifted his gaze to me and froze.

“Yeah.” I swept my hair over one shoulder, lifting and examining the long strands. “It looks rather different, doesn’t it?” In the darkness of the room with only the firelight, it was almost black.

He didn’t respond, just raked me from head to toe in my night robe. I refrained from tightening it again. I was well-covered. Still, his unguarded stare heated my blood in an unsettling way.

Who was I kidding? He always unsettled me. Rattled me right down to my core. Even in chains and dejected and humiliated back in Estonia, his presence had tuned me with an alarming vibration straight to my bones. And it had nothing to do with fear. I could finally admit that. It was undeniable yearning that trembled through me then, and even more now. Especially when he raked me with that burning blue gaze.

“You were thinking about where we’ll be going and—?” I tried to knock him out of his trance.

He lifted Deimos and set him on the rug, still curled into a ball, and then took a seat next to me.

Not good. Close proximity was doing strange things, twisting my insides. More so than before.

Carowyn was right. Sort of. But it was the other way around. He wasn’t leaning toward me. It was me leaning to him. Like he had a lodestone with my name engraved upon it fixed inside his chest, I had to focus to keep from gravitating toward him. Breaking away from his overwhelming gaze, I stared at my hands in my lap, fidgeting with the sash of my gown.

“I think you need more protection with where we’re going,” he said gently.

I shrugged on a laugh, the soft flannel of my robe not much of a barrier with him sitting so close. I hadn’t changed into my nightgown yet. I would have if I’d known he was still here, just to have one more layer of separation between us. Now, the idea of him sitting this close while the robe draped loosely over my naked skin felt entirely too intimate. My body practically hummed with desire.

“We can’t bring guards, you know that,” I said. “Besides, there’s no one else who could come with us.” I looped a finger around the long tendril of blue hair dangling at my temple. “Hence, the reason I had to do this.”

Finally looking up, I wished I hadn’t. He may still have the appearance of one of Michelangelo’s marble angels, but his eyes burned a searing path as they traced my hair, my face, my mouth. I gulped hard.

“No.” The one word was husky and too hard, not like his normal smooth timbre. “We can’t bring extra protection, but I can offer you something. A way of escape if you need it.”

“What way might that be?”

I held my breath for the three seconds it took him to finally answer with measured steadiness. “I can give you the power to sift.”

My heart stuttered. I blinked heavily, trying to decide if I heard him right. “What do you mean?”

His wide mouth ticked up on one side in a half smile that did nothing to help my poor heart to settle herself down. Quite the opposite.

“Exactly what I said. I want to give you the power to sift. That way, if things get out of hand, you can get away without waiting for me. We’ll be separated during the fights.” His brow pinched together. “I don’t like the idea of you having no means to escape if you need to while I’m in the ring.”

“But…but…” Didn’t he know that giving me an ability to sift would deplete his own power? I knew that as well as any. It was the reason few high demons and angels shared this power with others. They had to recover from sharing their power with another.

“What is it?” he asked calmly, his scorching gaze holding mine.

“But you have to fight in two nights. You can’t be weakened at all. Don’t you understand what kind of demons you’ll be up against?”

I realized my voice was near shrieking, but it only seemed to make him smile wider.

“I know what I’m up against. Don’t worry about me. Giving you this power will do little to weaken my abilities.” His jaw hardened before he added, “But it will give me some peace of mind while my focus is elsewhere.”

Okay. Either he was completely deluded, or he was one hell of a powerful archangel. With the current of electricity sizzling in the air, I was pretty sure it was the latter. Then my stomach sank for an entirely different reason. He dipped his head lower to catch my averted gaze.

“What is it?”

Clearing my throat, I tried for a nonchalant smile that I certainly didn’t feel. “No one has ever offered me this.”

The one thing that could protect me more than any wards or spells or even giant dragons, like the one I saw still parked out in the woods tonight when we’d returned to my cottage.

“Not even Skaal?” he asked pointedly.

Shaking my head, I whispered, “No one.”

“Well, I’m offering. I’d like to insist, but it’s up to you.”

“Of course I want it!”

He chuckled, and yet again, my skin heated in reaction to his insane beauty, which was blinding when he smiled.

“Why wouldn’t I want it?”

He sobered, amusement still dancing in his eyes. “Do you know how an exchange of power takes place?”

“Yes, everyone knows. It’s exchanged with a…” A drum sounded in my ears. A warning of exquisite, impending danger.

His expression remained completely unreadable, and yet I felt a simmering heat radiating outward. He nodded. “With a kiss.”

Panic seized me hard. But it wasn’t for the reasons I thought I’d fear any kind of intimate exchange with another man after Vladek. No, it wasn’t repulsion and fear that had sucked up all the moisture in my mouth and throat. It was a heady sensation that started at the base of my spine and spread upward in a wave of heat, flushing my cheeks pink.

“Your pulse is beating three times what it should be.”

“You can hear that?” Yes, definitely panic twanging my voice like a schoolgirl.

“I can.” He lifted his hand as if to touch me, then dropped it back to his lap, clenching his knee. “As I said, I understand if you don’t want to. But you’d be safer if you could…withstand it.”

I wanted to throw my head back and laugh, but I simply stared in disbelief. He thought my apprehension was because of my time with Vladek. He knew better than anyone the kind of repulsion I might have for any man’s touch. As he likely felt the same after his own captivity with Lisabette. But he was so wrong. My amped-up anxiety wasn’t because I dreaded his mouth on mine. It was because I longed for it. Needed it. Desperately.

“Y-yes.” Clearing my throat, I said in the most confident voice I could manage, “I want to.”

He straightened his shoulders, his wings parting slightly. Distracted by the movement, I didn’t see him lift his hand. Flinching at the intimate warmth of his large palm covering my left cheek and jaw, my gaze snapped to his. His expression remained calm, serene, tender even.

“It’s all right,” he crooned in a voice I’d not heard him use. One layered with archangel power and a soothing vibration that sung to my bones. “It won’t take long.” He leaned forward, my pulse taking off in a panic. “Close your eyes, Nadya.”

I obeyed immediately. I couldn’t watch his beautiful face coming any closer. He cupped my other cheek, the tips of his long fingers sliding into the edge of my hairline. The heat of his mouth hovered against mine, but not touching.

“Apertum mihi,” he whispered in Latin.

I didn’t know if he was speaking to me or summoning his power or both, but my lips parted on his command. Opened for him. Then his mouth was on mine, a firm but coaxing press of lips. A crackle of energy rippled over my skin, melting through flesh and bone on a blazing trail of…Uriel.

That’s all I could manage to think when his lips swept over mine, unhurried. Barely moving. One hand slipping to wrap my nape and cradle the back of my skull. The possessive hold broke something inside me. A wall of protection, a barricade of distance. The fortress I’d erected since Vladek, hoping to keep all men far and away from my damaged heart.

Uriel wasn’t even after my heart. This wasn’t even a real kiss. Not the kind that mattered. And still, a well opened up, flooding my body with intoxicating emotions. A river of sensuality sparked by a seemingly chaste kiss swept me to a hazy place. His power—a potent force—rushed through my veins on a dizzying tidal wave, crashing through and over every barrier I might’ve erected against him.

A moan slid up my throat and poured into his mouth. His fingers clenched at the base of my skull as if to keep me still. On a gasp where our lips parted for seconds, his stormy gaze glimpsed my face, his own frozen in a mixture of disbelief, fear, and stupefying desire.

A carnal groan rumbled in his chest, raising gooseflesh on my skin, before he hauled me into his lap.

Then he really kissed me.