Dangerous man. Gorgeous man. Her man.
Easing her sexual hold on him, she used her internal muscles to caress him again as she leaned in to kiss his throat, one hand on his chest, the fingers of the other rubbing at the highly sensitive inner edge of his wing. It was the final straw. Raphael gripped her jaw, bringing her in for a kiss that might as well have been sex, it was so untamed, so deep, so fucking hot.
Then there was no more strategy, no more battling for the reins, only a passionate engagement that had her screaming soundlessly as she orgasmed around the heated steel of his possession, her eyes locked with those of heartbreaking, unshadowed blue.
27
Raphael patted Elena’s wings dry, his consort having wrapped her body in a fluffy blue towel as she stood in the bathroom glaring at him via the mirror. “You were weird,” she said, succinct and to the point. “Like that time when you went Quiet.”
Raphael didn’t like who he became in the Quiet, that state of being where he acted with a cruelty driven by cold reason untempered by emotion. In the last and what he’d decided would be his final period of Quiet, he, who had once watched over angelic nurseries, had threatened a babe in pursuit of his goal. “Did I cause you harm?” he asked, dropping the towel to clasp his hand around her nape.
“Of course not.” An irritated scowl that to him was a kiss. “You did fuck my brains out, but since I did the same to you, I’m not complaining.”
Her temper the ultimate reassurance, he released her. As she walked out into the bedroom and found a robe, he followed to pull on a pair of black pants. He wouldn’t sleep this night; there was too much to do—the reason they were at the Tower, not the house—but he’d work from the bedroom until she was past the first problematic hours of sleep.
“I go into the Quiet when I expend a certain level and kind of power,” he said, “but this felt like something outside myself.” As if he stood in the deepest ocean, insulated from the world.
“An assault?” Curling tendrils of near white around her face where the strands had escaped the knot at the back of her head, Elena closed the short distance between them.
“One that drenched me with power? No.” He had a feeling it had been something far more dangerous. “If I am coming into my power, it appears it has the potential to fundamentally change me.”
“Never going to happen.” A stubborn glint in his hunter’s eye. “I’m not gonna lose my man.”
“I know.” Even in the strange cold, he’d tasted her fury, her passion, the searing depth of her love, and it had wrenched him back into her arms, all distance erased. “Now it’s time for my woman to go to bed.” She had circles under her eyes from the string of tension-filled days and interrupted sleep. “If you do not argue, I shall send you into slumber with bedtime tales of blood and death and annihilation from the last Cascade.”
“Yippee.” Slipping off the robe to reveal a body lithe and golden, she snuggled under the blankets.
He lay on his side atop those same blankets, tugging her hair from its knot to play with the wild silk of it. “Have you heard of the lost city of Atlantis?”
“Of course.” Her eyes widened, soft wonder in the silver-gray. “It was real?”
“My mother says the legend springs from a water city that existed millennia upon millennia ago—a city of remarkable artistry created by an archangel who had abilities such as those we now believe Astaad to have, except this archangel’s powers were at their height at the time.”
Bleak realization stole the wonder. “It was destroyed, wasn’t it?”
“Caliane is uncertain if some part of it does in truth lie below the ocean, protected by its archangel, but it fell victim to the last Cascade wars, as did many other great civilizations.”
“Such wonders lost forever, Raphael. Things that eclipse the creations of this modern world, until the boastfulness of today is that of children who have never seen true grace.”
Repeating Caliane’s judgment for Elena, he told her the rest, how the wars had circled the globe, soaking the earth in mortal and immortal blood both. “By the time they came to an end, a century after they began, half the world was gone and civilization had regressed by millennia.”
Elena shook her head, as if the knowledge was too terrible to bear. “These Cascades, there’s no way of telling how many have come and gone, how many times civilization has been all but erased only to start again.”
“Yes.” Shifting so his body covered her own, his hand in her hair, he told her the prelude to the final brutal fact. “Caliane has survived more than one Cascade.” That, he was certain, no one knew. “She says not all are equal, and that from the changes apparent in the Cadre so soon into the Cascade, this may be the strongest in all her eons of existence.”
Unhidden horror, his hunter’s arms holding him close. “If the last Cascade ended in the destruction of half the world . . .”
“Yes.”
• • •
Given Raphael’s ominous bedtime story, it was a miracle Elena slept as soundly as she did. When she woke, however, to a haunting quiet that told her more snow had fallen overnight, it was with a blinding need to escape the madness of the immortal world for a fragment of time.
Sara had the morning off—as much as a Guild Director could ever have time off—so Elena hooked up with her best friend and Zoe at a small neighborhood eatery for brunch. The owner and most of the regulars knew Elena from before her transformation and, while there were a few people who snuck photos, no one bothered them.
An hour and a half later, they stood in Central Park, watching a giggling Zoe try to catch the pigeons. Bundled up like a little polar bear in an orange snowsuit, the tiny girl would sit down in the snow every so often to rest, then be off again after the birds. Elena’s breath frosted the air as she laughed in delight at Zoe’s antics, the temperature freezing enough that Elena, too, was dressed for the weather, wearing a long-sleeved top underneath her black hunting leathers. Her immortal body might be tougher than a mortal’s, but it had become clear she was too young to shrug off this kind of cold—especially in flight, where she had to deal with wind chill as well.
“How’s Vivek?” Sara said, after sending Deacon a photo of Zoe sitting in the snow.
“Aodhan is supervising his transformation.” Elena had made certain Vivek was in hands she trusted. “I haven’t been to visit him—he asked me not to. I don’t think he wants any of us to see him while he’s so vulnerable.” Paralyzed he might’ve been, but Vivek had never been helpless as long as Elena had known him. “You know how much he likes to be in control.”
“I get it, but he’s still a proud idiot,” Sara said, her tone deeply affectionate.
“Keir’s personally monitoring his progress.” Sara had met the healer during her visit to the Refuge, knew the deep respect with which he was held in the immortal world. “It’s been a long time since the Making of a mortal with such a significant long-term injury.”
“Mommy!” Zoe ran back to them in that wild, almost-falling-over-at-any-instant way. “Isses!”