The crack of a whip.
Fire on her back, sticky liquid trailing down her broken flesh.
Jason came to a sudden stop ahead of the still-closed doors, his voice shattering the memory of the punishment meted out to her in Neha’s inner courtyard, the whip wielded by the Master of the Guard.
“My rooms?” he asked, his voice so pure, she found herself wondering, not for the first time, if he ever lifted it in song.
“In the palace across the courtyard,” she said, barely managing to keep her wing from sliding across his as she halted her own forward momentum.
Jason was not a man any woman would touch without invitation.
Now, reaching out, he opened the door and waited for her to exit. Courtesy, she thought—he’d given her his back earlier, had clearly written her off as a threat. She was too practical to be insulted. If Jason wanted to hurt her, she could do nothing to stop him. Hundreds of warriors, angelic and vampiric, might live in the fort, but the only offensive or defensive training Mahiya had came from what she’d been able to glean by covert study of their training sessions.
And no one, not even a woman determined to protect herself in any way she could, could learn to be a master fighter simply by watching, then attempting to copy those movements in the privacy of her bedroom or up in the isolation of the mountains. However, to ask for help would be to pay a price she couldn’t ask anyone to pay.
Her first fledgling friendship as an adult—two hundred years ago—had resulted in the angel in question having both his arms and his wings excised for an outwardly unrelated offense. Mahiya would never forget the way his blood had coated the stone of the warriors’ courtyard, darkening the granite to near-black even as his screams echoed off the walls of the surrounding barracks.
Mahiya had understood the brutal lesson, had never again attempted to build bonds with those in the fort, until many believed her a creature of conceit. Better that than to have their screams ringing in her ears as that young angel’s did to this day, though he was long healed.
“No one ever sees Jason coming. No one.”
The overheard words reverberating in her mind as she reached the courtyard, she heard him say something to the two angels at the door before he reappeared at her side. She glanced at his wings as they crossed over to the mountainside palace, expecting to see them silvered by the waning moon as were the black filaments in her own wings, but there was only darkness at Jason’s back—if she hadn’t known him for an angel, she’d have thought the spymaster a vampire.
Blinking, she stared, though it was a rudeness. “How do you do that?”
He didn’t ask her to explain what she meant. “A natural gift honed by time.”
Conscious that this predator—fascinating and darkly intriguing—was deadlier than any other she’d faced save Neha, she walked up the steps of the palace where Jason would stay for the duration. Though it wasn’t overtly guarded, only a fool would assume it wasn’t under constant watch.
When she walked through the open doors and turned to welcome Jason inside, he paused. “You live here.”
“Yes.” And had done so since she returned from the Refuge school, but it wasn’t home and never would be.
Soon, she promised herself, soon I will have a home where I will be safe, free from Neha’s bitter hate and the shadow of a father who didn’t know the meaning of fidelity.
Lowering her head in an apparent gesture of subservience lest Jason see too much, she said, “I’ll show you to your room.”
He followed her upstairs and into the sprawling room that overlooked the courtyard. Once, that had been the room she’d shared with Arav, believing herself loved. Desperate for happiness, she hadn’t wanted to see the truth until it slapped her in the face.
“You have been a most amusing diversion.” A laughing, condescending pat on the cheek at her bewildered expression. “And rather delightful. But Neha has approved my territorial proposal, and I’m afraid I must return to my lands and cease partaking of your pleasures.”
That heartbreakingly young, naïve girl was long gone, but Mahiya refused to allow the poison of Neha’s hatred to infect her—she knew full well Arav had only used her as he had because he’d divined her pain would please the archangel. That was a stain against his honor and said nothing of Mahiya’s own. She would love again, and she would love with all her heart, living her life in a brilliance of hope and joy.
“Will you be needing anything?” she asked the spymaster, who, feminine instinct whispered, was far more dangerous to her than Arav had ever been.
“No.”
Stepping back, she pulled the wooden doors shut and walked quickly to her own room, situated right next to his. However, she knew she’d be too late and she was. By the time she opened the doors to their shared balcony, Raphael’s spymaster had disappeared into the gray twilight that was the first harbinger of night’s fading kiss.
* * *
Gliding on the cool winds of the hour before dawn, Jason came to an easy landing on one of the walls of the heavily fortified Guardian Fort. It overlooked Archangel Fort and was considered an extension of it, a place where a considerable number of Neha’s angelic guard made their homes. Seen from its strong walls, Archangel Fort was a great lady yet asleep, though the scattering of lights burning in the windows told him the place never truly closed its eyes. As it should be. The Tower in New York never slept, either.
He saw an angel come in to land at the lower fort at that instant. From the way he brought himself to a harsh stop with two simple backbeats, Jason pegged the flyer as one of the warrior guards. Those guards were not exclusively angelic—Neha had her share of vampires in all positions, displaying no bias that could be utilized as a vulnerability.