Raphael ran his nails down her back.
She shuddered hard. “The sensations are back.” Of an intimate caress on her wings, of contact she’d permit only one being in this world.
One hand going to her nape, the other repeating the touch. Groaning, she closed her hands over the arches of his wings, and massaged down at just the right pressure to make him insane. The kiss was all teeth and sex this time, their bodies hot and sweaty as they slid against one another.
She rubbed against him before reaching down between their bodies to close her hand around the thickness of his cock. Rigid steel covered in silk, he thrust into her hand. Already wet for him, she kissed her way desperately down his neck while continuing to torment him.
His wings began to glow. Her core pulsed.
When he put his hands on her hips and hauled her into exactly the right position to take him, she laughed the husky laugh of a woman who knew she was irresistible to her lover. Moaning as he thrust into her, she dug her nails into his flesh, coming around him on the first stroke.
He wasn’t holding back.
It was an aphrodisiac beyond compare.
Had anyone been able to see through the glamour, they would’ve witnessed the ocean explode with a hidden sun.
* * *
• • •
The next day, Elena took her knives and walked into a small practice ring low down in the Tower—she didn’t need the massive space of the main ring. Not today. It was time she got back to strength training—and figured out her current body. She could compensate for weak muscles and shaky arms, but she had to see if her hand-eye coordination had survived the chrysalis.
She was only ten minutes into it when Dmitri walked in dressed in black cargo pants and a black T-shirt decorated with the faded logo of a metal band. “Space is taken,” she said with a scowl. “I booked it last night.”
“Came to see if you needed any help.” A smirk. “I’m feeling sorry for you since you’re so skinny and pathetic right now.”
Elena gave him her most fake smile. “Want to act as my target? I’m sure it’ll improve my accuracy one hundred percent.”
Dmitri raised both eyebrows, then smiled, slow and sensual. “Why not?”
And so began the craziest throwing session of Elena’s life. Dmitri was a deadly fast vampire and her muscles remained wobbly, but it turned out that her hand-eye coordination was just fine. So was her ability to think on her feet. Ten minutes. Twenty. Thirty.
She threw a second blade on the heels of the first, after he’d already committed to his avoidance strategy.
It slammed home in Dmitri’s shoulder. The hilt quivered from the impact.
They both froze for a taut, silent second. Until the wet patch on his T-shirt began to spread. “Fuck! Get that out right now! Honor will goddamn murder me.” She’d never expected to score such a solid hit—Dmitri was too fast, too experienced. “I’m getting you some blood.”
Elena ran to the fridge just outside the training ring, grabbed a bottle. Powerful as he was, the infusion of blood should cause the wound to heal in a matter of minutes. Well before Honor laid eyes on it. Because it was one thing to threaten her friend’s bastard of a husband, quite another to wound him badly.
Hilts didn’t quiver that way unless the blade had hit bone.
Dmitri had finished pulling out the knife by then. Flipping it around, he lobbed it back to her. “It’s just a scratch. Like being bitten by a mosquito.”
“Shut up and drink this.” She thrust the bottle into his hand.
“Such solicitude. I’m touched.”
Tendrils of fur and champagne wrapped around her, decadent chocolate sinking into her taste buds at the same time. Gritting her teeth, she backed off. “Scent games? You want me to stab you again?”
Having finished half the bottle, he lowered it and shrugged. “I’m the one bleeding.” He touched the wet patch—which had stopped its terrifying spread at last. “No more mollycoddling you, sweet Elieanora.”
“You’re an asshole,” she said past the avalanche of drugging scent, though her lips wanted to kick up. The asshole happened to be the most powerful vampire in Raphael’s territory, brutal and deadly—and he’d just told her that he was taking off the kid gloves.
As a compliment, it was a damn fine one.
Shit, she owed him now. He’d been nice to her. It was an utterly horrifying thought. But not enough to stifle her grin. Her hands closed on the hilts of her blades. “Ready for round two, or does bubby-wubby need another bottle?”
Dark eyes gleamed, champagne spun in her head, and Dmitri moved.
Her blades flew like silver fire, streaking through the air with lethal accuracy.
23
One month after the ridiculously fun session with Dmitri—not that either one of them would admit that even on pain of hideous torture—and Elena wasn’t yet as muscled as she would’ve liked. Her weight was only up to eighty-five percent of her normal, so she still felt a bit too insubstantial, but she no longer had any appearance of illness.
The sex mojo had returned twice more in the week after the knife session. Her body had stopped glitching after the second boost. After that, anything she’d achieved, she’d done so through teeth-clenched hard work.
When she applied to the Guild to return to active duty, Sara said, “You have to pass the post-injury physical.”
Elena would’ve been insulted at any other response. Guild medics gave her a clean bill of health, though lightning fissures did still break out over her body at times—as if a bite of Raphael’s power had woven itself into her bones, the heart in her chest strong enough to manage archangelic energies.
Her status on the taxonomic tree however, continued to give everyone fits. She was immortal, of that there was no doubt. Not an almost-immortal like a vampire, not a baby immortal as she’d been before the chrysalis, but equivalent to an adult angel of around three hundred.
Except she wasn’t an angel. Her DNA was distinctly odd and the only wings she had were phantom ones that tormented her with how real they felt. At times, she had to check in a mirror, confirm there was nothing on her back, no graceful arches, no feathers of midnight and dawn.
Elena struggled with that until Naasir, of all people, decided to pay her a visit. “I am the only one of my kind,” he said to her as they sat on the edge of a balcony, their feet hanging over it and the metallic silver of his hair choppy and striking against the rich dark of his skin, the undertone of gold reminiscent of a leopard’s coat.
Elena pinned him with a narrow-eyed gaze. “Do tell me more about your unique kind. I’m all ears.”