Charlotte cried. God, I hadn’t known the woman for more than two weeks and she was killing me with her tears. She was killing me, period. I fucked her hard and good again and then I told her the plan. Not real nice of me to drop the bomb during afterglow, I’ll admit, but we had to get a move on. I couldn’t let her go without another taste, I’m not that much of a martyr. But she cried. I tried to kiss her tears away, but she wasn’t having any of it.
She pulled away from me and sat up in our bed. Fuck, we hadn’t really spent more than a day as lovers, and now I had to send her off. I ran my fingertips down her back, and while she shivered, she didn’t turn to look at me.
“Baby, it’s just for a little while—”
“No it isn’t,” she interjected, anger in her tone. “He’s going to kill you. You’re sending me away so that Capone can kill you.”
Since I couldn’t argue with that, I didn’t say anything.
Now she turned to me in a rustle of bedclothes. Her hair was delightfully tousled and her cheeks were red with the burn of my stubble. “He’s going to kill you,” she said again, like I was a fool.
“He was going to kill me sooner or later, Charlotte.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m in his way. Better to barter for something I love while I’m going down.”
She blinked. “What did you say?”
In all of my mixed up emotions over the last thousand years, I don’t think I’d ever loved anyone. Not the way I loved Charlotte. There was a goodness in her that wasn’t in a lot of people. Hell, she’d traveled over a bunch of states to help her fucking parents out of a jam. But more than that, as a fallen angel, as a Hunter, I’d seen a lot in my years. Charlotte was the only woman I’d seen that could even hold a candle to what Heaven had been like.
Oh, I didn’t believe that Charlotte was sent from Heaven, far from it. But a lot of people lose the innocence they’re born with before they even hit their teens. Charlotte still had it. She glowed with it. It’s the light of a million stars almost. Those big blue eyes went straight to her soul and what I saw in them I hadn’t seen in a millennia.
“Yeah,” I ran a hand over my head. “About that….”
“You said you loved me?”
See? Those big blue eyes were blinking now, tears filling them up fast. All I could do for her now was get her home. Back to where she belonged. I wasn’t good enough for her, but she’d always be mine. And I didn’t have the heart to lie to her, to hurt her worse than I was.
“Yeah, Baby. Yeah, I said that.”
She threw her arms around me. “Oh, Angelo.” I heard the sob in her throat before she let it go. “I love you, too,” she whispered.
Her tears wet my cheek.
Then I realized they weren’t hers.
****
I waited until she was getting ready in the bathroom before I pulled my staff out of my inner coat pocket. Her carpet bag was sitting on the bed, the money in a false bottom we’d put in. Carefully, so as not to disturb the clothes she’d packed, I fit the staff in next to the money. Maybe she’d never find it, hidden as it was in that carpet bag. Maybe she would find it and think how pretty this jeweled stick was. At the very least, when I went to look for her, I’d be able to hone in on my staff. Sure, I’d probably need it when I went to get Capone, but giving it to Charlotte was more important.
Before she could make it out of the bathroom, I snuck away.
We’d already said our goodbyes.