Archangel's Sun (Guild Hunter #13)(19)

Teeth gritted, she bathed quickly then was annoyed at herself for automatically picking up the bottle of lotion afterward. But that was a habit too ingrained to shun and since his people had made the effort to provide for her with such care, she slathered her body in the silky cream scented softly with a flower she couldn’t name, before heading out into the bedroom and pulling on her blue-gray tunic and dark brown pants.

Having washed her hair the previous night, she simply brushed it out, then pulled it back into a tight tail at the back of her head. Again, when she looked in the mirror, she saw a fresh-faced young woman looking back at her. Only her eyes gave her away. They were old, telling of the life she’d lived . . . and not lived.

Gut tight, she turned away, her hand going to her right wrist, where she wore a bracelet that Illium had sent her from New York. It was made of platinum metal, each of the links slender but strong; the heart that hung from one end bore not her name but his. It had made her laugh, because of course her mischievous boy would do this. She wore the gift with pride, her son’s name, her son’s love.

She deliberately didn’t go up into the art room. It was an act of willpower on her part. Perhaps Titus had done her a favor there after all—he’d placed her drug of choice within reach and now she’d have to resist temptation each time she was in this suite, thus building her strength of will.

She’d spoken to Keir, an angelic healer, not long before she’d come to Lumia, right when she’d begun to find her way out of the kaleidoscope. It was Caliane who’d urged her to do so. “If I were badly wounded in battle,” her friend had said, “I’d seek a healer and feel no disquiet in doing so. A wound of the mind is no different.”

Keir had made time to spend near to an entire week with her. For some reason, she’d found herself telling the calm-eyed and slender healer all of it, digging right down to the heart of what Caliane had termed her wound.

“Aegaeon’s actions impacted on brutal past trauma,” Keir had said in his gentle way, this man who was one of the few in angelkind not very much taller than her own diminutive height. “Each event in our life leaves a mark—in your case, two critical events left deep fractures in the same part of your psyche. Those fractures compounded into a break when Aegaeon chose to take an action that I, as a man, as a healer, as a lover, cannot comprehend.”

Keir wasn’t one to exhibit intense emotion—at least to his patients. He tended to be a haven of calm. But his brown eyes had held a wealth of darkness when he’d said, “You retreated into what you knew best in order to heal. You can’t blame yourself for that instinctive action.”

Sharine accepted that Aegaeon had acted with unwarranted vindictiveness. To this day, she didn’t know why—as vulnerable as she’d been then, to charm of a kind she’d never experienced in her mostly solitary and quiet existence. Aegaeon had overwhelmed her; she’d wanted desperately to cling to him—and that was on her and the ghosts that haunted her—but in actual fact, she hadn’t.

He’d kept his harem, kept his life away from her and Illium in the Refuge.

Sharine hadn’t attempted to clip his wings, hadn’t sought to alter the core of his nature, content with the scraps of affection he threw her way.

How foolish she’d been, how hungry for connection.

But it all added up to a single conclusion: he’d had no reason to strike out. Not only at her but at her son. Their son. Forget what he’d done to her, it would’ve cost him nothing to have gone to Illium and hugged him good-bye. It would’ve taken but a sliver of his time to tell their boy that his father was going to Sleep for a period, but that he loved him and would return.

Such things mattered to a child, mattered deeply.

For breaking their bright, beautiful boy’s small heart, Sharine would never forgive him. Never. Even if she lived to the end of time and beyond.

No one hurt her child.

Hand fisting at her side, her nails digging into her skin, she opened the door of the suite and stepped out into the hallway. That hallway was wide and fell away onto a massive central core. Walking to the railingless edge, she looked down and realized that she was about three stories up in a huge citadel built of gray stone that was both martial and hard—and lovely.

Fine veins of minerals wove through the stone “bricks” and each piece of stone had gradations of color that caught her eye and had her running a hand over the nearest support pillar. It was warmer than she’d expected, the stone smooth from all the time it had stood here, all the warriors and others who had placed their hands against it.

It could’ve been a cold place, but the stone had a glowing heart, and against the walls of the central core hung tapestries lush with the life of this land. Huge works of art that she could stand in front of for hours, taking in detail by detail. But that was just the start. Above her curved a gently sloping ceiling on which had been painted a night sky sparkling with the stars she’d see if she looked up after darkfall.

Each star, she realized suddenly, was a dazzling gemstone turned tiny by the distance.

Below her, meanwhile, was a buzz of constant movement.

Titus’s people walked this way and that and crisscrossed over what looked to be a massive carpet in the colors of sunset that could’ve come from Morocco. Perhaps during a time prior to the warlike tension between Titus and Charisemnon. Most of those she saw wore weathered and bloodied warrior gear, including more than one angel in full, lightweight armor that wouldn’t impede them in the sky.