Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Raphael and Elena are experiencing their first ever year of true peace. No war. No horrors of archangelic power. No nightmares given flesh. Until…the earth beneath the Refuge begins to tremble, endangering not only angelkind’s precious and fragile young, but the very place that has held their most innocent safe for eons.
Amid the chaos, Elena’s father suffers a violent heart attack that threatens to extinguish their last chance to heal the bonds between them and make sense of the ruins of their agonizing shared history.
Even as Elena battles grief, Raphael is torn from her side by the sudden disappearance of an archangel. But worse yet is to come. An Ancestor, an angel unlike any other, stirs from his Sleep to warn the Cadre of a darkness so terrible that it causes empires to fall and civilizations to vanish.
This time, even the Cadre itself may not be able to stop a ticking clock that is counting down at frightening speed…
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
Oh, you must not.
Your tears wound me, but there is no choice. I cannot go on. I have tried until I have no more breath in the shell of my body and no heart in the core of my self.
The river—
—is eternal. What falls will always rise. One civilization or another, what does it matter to me?
My love, you were never this heartless. You ever cared for your people. I saw you cradle newborn mortals in your arms and kiss their soft cheeks.
You see why I must do this, beloved. Do I not, I turn slowly into a monster cold and without sympathy for those who are smaller, weaker, my shell all that remains.
Ah, my heart. Come to me. We will lie inside my fire this day and the next and the next until eternity ends.
And in the heartbeats between lifetimes, I will look into your eyes and I will be whole.
2
Elena kicked out a booted foot to check the give in her opulent ball gown and grinned when the falls of fabric around her legs parted like they weren’t there. “Montgomery strikes again,” she said, then busied herself slipping her throwing knives into the decorative sheaths at her forearms.
At some point during her roughly two decades as Raphael’s consort, she’d said to hell with it and decided to give herself a new trademark: arm sheaths. These days, no one blinked an eye at her preference for weapons as jewelry; it definitely took the edge off, not having to find places to secrete weapons.
Not that she didn’t also always have hidden weapons.
Elena was never not going to have a concealed garrote or a dart that blew drug-laced needles somewhere on her person. The latter had been a joke birthday gift from her hunter friends, but she’d realized the real thing could pass as a decorative pendant in situations where other weapons might be seen as a sign of aggression.
Setting her personal style as including arm sheaths had ameliorated the latter threat. Who cared if the snooty old angels called it a “mortal affectation” with their condescending noses so far up in the air that it was a wonder they didn’t unbalance and fall over backward. The idiots thought they were insulting her. Hah. Having a mortal heart, a mortal soul, was a gift she cherished in this world where so many frittered away entire centuries because they always had one more day.
What had taken her aback was when a cohort of “edgy” young courtiers began to copy her with jewel-encrusted monstrosities they dared call blades. Those insults of weapons couldn’t fly a single foot in a straight line, much less actually hit a target, but per Illium, that’s what she got for being a fashion “icon.”
Their pretty Bluebell was going to get his feathers plucked one of these days.
The unbound near-white of her waist-length hair being brushed aside, a kiss pressed to the back of her neck that made a shiver ripple over her body as wings of white-gold opened in her peripheral vision.
Her stomach tumbled, as if this was the first time Raphael had ever touched her.
Leaning back into his warm and muscled form, his upper body yet bare, she groaned. “Does that mean you’re agreeing to my idea of blowing off this deal and getting naked?”
Oceans ice-blue and windswept crashed into her mind, his laughter filling her world. “Alas, hbeebti, I must do my duty today. As must you.” Another kiss, this one to the curve of her throat, as he placed one hand on her abdomen. “After it is done, however . . . I know a place where we can tangle wings far from the rest of the world.”
Her thighs clenched, the need she had for him a potent addiction; knowing him, growing with him had made her fall ever deeper for the Archangel of New York.
Lifting her hand to slide it over the back of his neck without fully turning, she stroked the heat of his skin. “You have a deal and I’m holding you to it.” Tired of the pageantry and politics, she needed what only he could give her.
“I like this dress,” he murmured, their eyes meeting in the mirror.
His were twin blue flames, the color piercing and impossible in its violent purity, a punch to the heart every single time. The midnight of his hair was tumbled and damp from his quick shower, the planes of his face dangerously striking under skin kissed by the sun.
The Legion mark on his right temple—the shape a stylized dragon—flickered with light that was diamonds tumbling in the ocean. The renewed energy of the mark was a recent development. It had gone flat and lifeless after the Legion gave up their lives, and in time, like a tattoo held too long in the skin, had begun to fade.