Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter #2)(55)

“Must be something in the air,” she found herself saying in a voice so quiet, it was almost not sound. “I can’t seem to stop thinking of my mother, my sisters.” It was the first time she’d ever spoken of her nightmares aloud. Even her best friend didn’t know the truth of her childhood, of the evil that haunted her until some days she could hardly breathe.

“Tell me their names.” Warm breath against her neck, his arms so strong around her.

“You know.”

“It’s only fact.”

“My mother,” she said, holding on, holding tight, “her name was Marguerite.”

Elena. A mental kiss, his scent enfolding her as protectively as his arms.

Her lip quivered until she caught it between her teeth. “She’d been in the States since she married my father, but she still spoke with a Parisian accent. She was this fascinating, lovely butterfly with her laughter and her quick hands. I used to just love sitting in the kitchen, or in her work room, watching my mother talk as she worked.”

Marguerite had made quilts, beautiful one-of-a-kind pieces that had sold for enough money that she’d built up a small nest egg. Nothing in comparison to her husband’s fortune, but hers had been passed on to her daughters with love, while Jeffrey . . . “She’d never have let my father do what he did.”

“He lives only because I know you love him.”

“I shouldn’t, but I can’t stop myself.” That love was rooted too deep, so deep that even years of neglect hadn’t snuffed it out completely. “I used to wish he’d died instead of my mother, but I know my mom would’ve hated me for thinking that.”

“Your mother would’ve forgiven you.”

Elena wanted to believe that so much it hurt. “She was the heart of our family. After her death, everything died.”

“Tell me of your lost sisters.”

“If Mama was the heart, then Ari and Belle were the peace and the storm.” They’d left a gaping hole in the Deveraux family when their blood slicked across the floor.

Slater’s handsome face, his lips painted a glistening red.

She clung to Raphael, shoving away the hated image with desperate hands. “I was the middle child and I liked it. Beth was the baby, but Ari and Belle let me do things with them sometimes.” No more words would come, her chest tight with lack of air.

“I didn’t have siblings.”

The words were unexpected enough that they broke through her anguish. Staying in place, wrapped around Raphael like ivy, she listened.

“Angelic births are rare, and my parents were both thousands of years old when I was born.” Each birth was a celebration but his had been particularly feted. “I was the first child born of two archangels in several millennia.”

Elena, his hunter trusting him to hold her safe, lay quiet against him, but he could feel her attention, her palm warm through the linen of his shirt. Sliding one of his own hands down her naked back, slow and easy, he continued to talk, to share things he’d not spoken of in an eternity. “But there were some who said I shouldn’t have been born.”

“Why?” She raised her head, clearing her eyes with hard swipes of her knuckles. “Why would they say that?”

“Because Nadiel and Caliane were too old.” Holding her close enough that her breasts brushed his chest with every breath, he moved his hands up over the curve of her waist, her rib cage, savoring the feel of her skin against his own. “There was concern that they’d begun to degenerate.”

Elena frowned. “I don’t understand. Immortality is immortality.”

“But we evolve,” he said. “Some of us devolve.”

“Lijuan,” she whispered. “Has she evolved?”

“That’s what we say, but even the Cadre wonders what it is she’s evolving into.” A nightmare, that was certain. But a private one, or one that would lay waste to the world?

Elena was in no way stupid. She understood in bare seconds. “That’s why your mother executed your father.”

“Yes. He was the first.”

“Both?” Pain—for him—arced through those expressive eyes.

“Not at the start.” He saw the last moments of his father’s existence as clearly as if the scenes were painted across his irises. “My father’s life ended in fire.”

“That mural,” she said, “on the hallway in our wing—it’s his death.”

“A reminder of what might await me.”

She shook her head. “Never. I won’t let it happen.”

His human, he thought, his hunter. She was so very young, and yet there was a core of strength in her that fascinated him, would continue to fascinate him through the ages. She’d already changed him in ways he didn’t understand—perhaps, he thought slowly, there was a chance she might save him from Nadiel’s madness. “Even if you fail,” he said, “I have every confidence that you’ll find a way to end my life before I stain the world with evil.”

Rebellion in those eyes. “We die,” she said, “we die together. That’s the deal.”

He thought about his final thoughts as he’d fallen with her in New York, her body broken in his arms, her voice less than a whisper in his mind. He hadn’t considered holding onto his eternity for a second, had chosen to die with her, with his hunter. That she would choose to do the same . . . His hands clenched. “We die,” he repeated, “we die together.”