Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(26)

At least once a month, Zanaya’s mother would sit down and open the box just as the sun was about to set—then, in the flickering glow of candlelight, Rzia would touch and fondle the pretty and meaningless objects while sobbing. At least that had been the case when Zanaya was younger. Later, Rzia had spewed hate . . . while continuing to hoard the trinkets that were all she’d ever had of Camio.

“I can buy my own baubles,” Zanaya added, for good measure.

Alexander glanced over his shoulder, no insult in his eye and a smile wicked and beautiful on his lips. “Do you think I don’t know you at all, Zani?”

He looked young and wild and he made her pulse race. Which only added fuel to the fire of her need to take a step back, retreat from the visceral depth of what he did to her.

Then he opened the trunk and bent down to retrieve the item.

She sucked in a breath when he rose, because lying flat across his hands was a sword that she knew from a glance had been crafted by the most gifted weapons-maker in the world: Master Llisak. Given the sheer length of his waiting list, this sword had to have been ordered a long, long time ago.

For her.

She knew that the instant she took the hilt in her hand, lifted it up. It felt like air and it felt like danger, a weapon designed specifically for her body and muscle mass and the way she fought. The blade was lethal grace, the hilt embedded with opals that sparkled in the light while being set deep enough that they’d be no impediment.

When she swung the blade in a rapid dance of movement, it sang.

Perhaps, in the grip of her dread about the intensity of what she felt for Alexander, she might’ve rejected any other gift—but she was too much the warrior to reject this. “Lover, this isn’t a gift,” she said after she came to a standstill. “This is a treasure.” Her voice was husky, her skin hot from embarrassment at her earlier disagreeable behavior.

When she met his gaze, she expected satisfaction, perhaps a little smug arrogance. But what she saw was a glitter in the silver, a flame that wasn’t about the flesh. “You are magnificent in motion.”

Flushing, feeling like a youngling gawky and awkward, she glanced at the hilt, rubbed her hand over a blue opal with a red heart that flickered in the sunlight. “Firelight,” she murmured, raising the blade to watch the sun kiss the gleaming metal of it. “A sword like this needs a name. And this one is created of fire and light.”

“As are you.” Gilded by the sun, Alexander crossed to kiss her where she stood beside his tumbled bed.

Firelight held at her side, she was sinking into the heat of the lushly intimate connection, her breasts pressed to the warm muscle of a man who’d been born to be a warrior, when she felt an indentation in the hilt that she’d assumed was a part of the design . . . but now she frowned. The indentation was too deep, made the hilt a fraction imperfect. And none of Master Llisak’s work was imperfect.

“Wait.” Breaking the kiss, the scent of Alexander in her breath and his hand on her hip, she moved back enough that she could lift the sword, look at the indentation.

Only, it wasn’t an indentation. It was the setting for another gemstone—but that gemstone was missing. “Master Llisak doesn’t make mistakes,” she murmured, confused by the error.

“No.” Alexander’s tone . . . it held time and power and a fury of emotion that gripped her by the throat.



* * *



*

Alexander felt his heart thunder. He’d thought this a small matter, a mere symbol of what was already true, but there was a potent resonance in this moment that stunned him. Swallowing to wet a throat gone dry, he moved back to the trunk to retrieve a small drawstring bag he’d kept there alongside Firelight.

Zanaya watched him in motionless silence, her pupils dilated and her breathing unsteady.

As was his.

Foolishness.

Yet his hand trembled when he returned to stand in front of her, then undid the drawstring and dropped the gemstone within onto his other palm. A piece of amber of a hue so deep it might be mistaken for a ruby, it wasn’t smooth and round but cut in facets that would fit perfectly into the empty space in Firelight’s hilt.

He wasn’t sure either one of them was breathing when he met her gaze and said, “Will you wear my amber, Zani?” A roar of sound in his ears.

Alexander had never before asked anyone to wear his amber. Amber wasn’t a gift cheaply or oft given in their kind. It might not be the rarest of the gemstones, but amber held history, held time. Amber was endless. And amber was shared only between lovers who were so deeply entangled that they had no wish to be unentangled.

His mother had worn hers as a pendant, his father his as a bracelet of metal with an amber centerpiece, the jewelry such a familiar part of Alexander’s childhood that he hadn’t truly ever noticed it—except when it was missing. That had happened exactly once, the bloody and brutal moment carved into his memories. Otherwise, his parents’ amber had just been, a constant representation of their intent to be together.

Zanaya, his windstorm of a lover, just stared at the gem on his palm.

Alexander had never had a problem with standing his ground, but today, he almost closed his fingers over the offering, his mind working out how to pretend it had never happened . . . but then she lifted a hand and touched a single finger to the amber.

That finger trembled.