Archangel's Resurrection (Guild Hunter #15)(31)

“I’ve . . . I’ve looked back,” Zanaya said, her face stark. “And I did reject things too hard and fast at times. I vow not to react reflexively, vow to truly listen.”

“So will I. You began to reject my offers when I started to corner you.” He’d spent many a night railing at himself for his stupidity—he must’ve been actually insane to attempt to cage a woman who had told him she would rather die than live in even the most gilded cage. “We ended up in a cycle of destruction.”

A softness in her expression at the raw honesty of his confession. “You stalk me in my dreams, lover.”

They were tentative with each other this time, more careful about the words they said and the wounds they inflicted. The hesitation felt awkward but the kind of awkward that can be borne for the promise of better things—and there was so much good between them. So much laughter, so much adventure, so much trust.

They went flying through the ravines of the jagged and glorious mountain range that acted as a natural barrier between the Refuge and the mortal world. They camped atop a towering natural plinth deep in the lands of her archangel. They visited Osiris in the tropics and ate sour fruits that made their faces shrivel and their tongues go numb.

He never felt as young as he did when Zanaya was by his side.

She made the world come alive for him in the wildest, most beautiful way. His favorite times with her though, were the rare moments when she allowed her guard to fall, revealing the sweetness at her core. A sweetness that meant she always bought treats for the urchins in any market through which they passed, and that led her to rescuing lost or abandoned animals to the point that she’d hired a vampire to look after her menagerie.

That vampire, of course, had been badly broken by his past. Another wounded being for Zanaya to pick up and take home. Putting him in charge of the animals had been a stroke of genius on her part. He’d healed through healing them, and was utterly devoted to both the creatures and to Zanaya.

“My mother had no tenderness in her when I was a child,” she told him once, as they lay in the dark looking up at the stars, the waving golden grasses of Alexander’s territory creating a secluded cocoon around them. “She taught me that the world would crush me if I wasn’t faster, harder, with an armored shell.”

Alexander scowled. Rzia was far from his favorite person, but he couldn’t erase the fact she was Zanaya’s mother. “You understand that she was speaking out of anger?” An anger she’d nurtured and taken out on her child—creating a toxic environment from which Zanaya’s father had never bothered to remove her.

No, Alexander would never respect either one of Zanaya’s parents.

Zanaya took so long to reply that the night insects began to buzz again around them, lit by the glow of the gravid moon, and he thought the conversation was over. Then she spoke, her words without tone. “Over the years, I’ve met people who knew her when she was a newborn adult. They say she was na?ve, soft, tender as they come.”

Sitting up, she put her arms around her knees, her hair a soft silvery waterfall down her back. “I can’t imagine her that way, no matter how I try. All I remember is her coldness, and how she taught me that the weak get crushed, that the world uses them up and spits them out.”

A smile without humor. “My father, when I met him as an adult, do you know what advice he gave me? To not allow life to become stagnant. It sounds like excellent advice for an immortal, doesn’t it?

“But for Camio, it applies to people, too. Get bored? Move on. Too broken? Move on. Too needy? Move on.” A sharp huff of sound. “Babies are needy. A child is needy. It’s as well he’s not one of our more fertile brethren and I’m his only offspring.”

Alexander sat up, frowned. “Was he Rzia’s first experience of love?”

“I don’t know. It may surprise you to learn that my mother and I aren’t close enough to discuss such intimacies.” Dry words. “But you see the stock from which I come. One who uses and discards without compunction. One who pickles herself in bitterness and obsession. Does it not scare you off?”

After the way they’d broken so savagely, Alexander took conscious care never to act in any way overbearing with Zanaya—her need to be free and independent was a storm. He couldn’t blame her. A number of years into their initial relationship, she’d shared that Rzia had wanted to raise her in total isolation, that she’d only settled in the hamlet and permitted Zanaya to interact with the warriors who lived there because of the fear she’d otherwise be ordered to return to the Refuge—which was a regular haunt of Camio’s.

Rzia had tried to stifle Zanaya’s spirit at every turn nonetheless, clip her wings. She might’ve told herself she was doing it for Zanaya’s own good, a twisted way to protect her, but it had been nothing of the kind. It had been the action of an angry woman who’d had no one on whom to expend her rage but a small and defenseless girl.

So yes, Alexander understood his Zani’s need for freedom above all things. He might’ve made a mess of it once, not comprehending the true depth of his lover’s scars, but no one had ever called Alexander a stupid man. So today, he made no demands; rather, he laid his heart at her feet and said, “Let me hold you, Zani. I need to hold you.”

For the first time in their life together, she didn’t argue, just tucked herself against his chest and let him wrap his arms and his wings around her. And for a moment in time under the moonlight, they were the best they could be to each other.