Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(29)

He’d watched her fight in battle and roared with pride because she was his.

He dreamed of her when she was in her archangel’s territory, and he’d made friends with Inj’ra for the mercenary reason that it meant he could visit Zanaya almost at will.

Sliding her hand down to his cock, she gripped it, squeezed hard. “Do you think I don’t know that you talked my sire into positioning me in your court for the turn of the moon? Your generals need my guidance about as much as mine need yours.” That black fire in her astonishing eyes. “I’m not a doll for you to move as you wish, Archangel Alexander.”

He could’ve met anger with anger, but he cupped her cheek, the melded onyx and amber of the strong and powerfully unique ring she’d given him a warm familiarity on his finger. Unlike most such rings, his didn’t feature a piece of amber—rather, the amber and the onyx had been worked together, so that the sunlight of the amber wove through the obsidian of the onyx.

She laughingly refused to tell him how she’d done it. But that she’d taken as much care with his amber as he had with hers meant everything. “I can’t sleep when you’re far from me,” he said. “I did it once, waited more than a millennium. Never again. I’ll cheat, lie, and bargain to have you close.”

A startled blink, her fingers releasing him at last, her hand coming to lie flat against his chest. “You shouldn’t say these things, lover,” she murmured. “I will take advantage. To control an archangel would be a power indeed.”

He knew that she told the truth, that part of her was exactly that merciless—and he loved her all the same. Because she’d forgotten one critical factor. “Are you in control then, Zani?” A single kiss was all it took, her answer in the primal pumping of her hips as she rode him, and in the bites she left all over his body.

“I will own you,” she said, her skin aglow with heat in the aftermath and her eyes glittering. “Until you’re in me and I’m no longer this mad creature around you.”

“Try,” Alexander said in challenge as he began to kiss his way down her body, to the shadowed juncture between her thighs.

She screamed her pleasure, her hands wrenching at his hair and her thighs clamping around his head. He rode her bliss, licking her into oblivion even as he spilled his own seed onto the bed like a callow youth with his first woman.

He should’ve been embarrassed, full of shame—but there was no such thing with Zanaya. They were both as greedy, both as ruled by obsession, and when the time came that he had to let her go so she could return to her archangel, he had to fight his basest instincts. They wanted to cage her, keep her.

“I would rather cut my own throat than live in a cage,” she said to him when he spoke his desire aloud. “Poke out my own eyes so that the needles go straight into the brain. Drop my body onto a spike that obliterates my heart. Anything it takes, I would do. I will not be a caged bird, Alexander.”

Then she kissed him, her nails leaving clawed trails down his chest.



* * *



*

“It’s insanity,” he said to Callie the next time they met. “How we are with each other. It’s not normal in any sense of the word.” At times, he felt as if Zanaya was the most dangerous creature to him in all the world. “And yet I can’t let her go.”

“It worries me, too,” Callie murmured. “This obsession I see in you. Will you start a war for her, Alex?”

He clenched his jaw. “No. Because to do so would be to lose her. She will fight for her archangel.”

“I’d hate her for doing this to you,” Caliane said, “but there is the loyal heart you both share. She’s ruthless and arrogant and all too aware of her own power, but she also has a heart full of devotion. I watched her, you know. For you. I checked to see what she does when she’s away from you. She fights. She trains. She cares for her hounds and spoils her cats. She supports her friends and comrades. And she never lies with anyone else.”

Alexander hadn’t needed Caliane to tell him that; he knew. How could Zani lie with anyone else when what burned between them was an inferno that scarred until neither could be with any other? Alexander lay with no other, too, his devotion as dark and as brutal as her own.

That devotion continued to build and build until it was too dark, too demanding. Jealousy took root inside him in slow whispers fanned into rage by distance and loneliness, a green-eyed snake that craved to possess her, to keep her. The rational part of him knew that was the worst possible thing he could demand of her, but he wasn’t rational anymore.

“I love you!” He slammed a fist into his heart, the two of them alone on a desolate mountaintop cloaked in night. “More than is sane for me to love! Yet you’d rather spend far more time with other men!”

“I’m a general, you ass! Those men are part of my squadrons! I’m the one with room to complain!” The mountain winds howled as they moved through the peaks, blowing Zanaya’s unbound hair back from her face in a tangle of purple-hued silver. “Do you think I don’t see all those angels and vampires fluttering their eyelashes at you and all but falling out of their clothes whenever you walk by?”

He waved off the ridiculousness of the idea. “Are you questioning my word?”

“Are you questioning mine?” she yelled back.