Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
That day, that argument, bruised and battered them both, and it was the start of a rot. Not birthed by anger this time, but by a kind of disappointment that had them pulling away from the relationship as each nursed their own emotional wounds, certain in the knowledge that their love could never be returned in the way they needed it to be returned.
Their very devotion became a poison in its voracious demand.
It asked them to fall into each other—and only each other, shutting out the rest of the world, all their responsibilities, all their friendships, anything else that might steal the air from the inferno that scalded them. It was a thing of madness that could never be satisfied, a devotion so pitiless it could lead to murder and to war.
It refused to allow either of them to breathe.
And in so doing, it succeeded in choking the life out of the love that bound them to one another, until one day . . . they just weren’t together anymore. It hurt worse than the first break, because their love had been deeper this time around, their understanding of each other much more profound.
Alexander didn’t rage, just threw himself into his work as an archangel. And, after a century of silence between them, he took the odd lover. No one who’d ever be to him what Zanaya had been, but safe choices, women who asked nothing of him but what he was willing to give, women who would never make him question a single decision, much less threaten to push him into the abyss. He knew Zanaya must’ve moved on, too, but as he’d once listened for news of her, he now blocked all knowledge of First General Zanaya.
He also began to accept that they were too combustible together, hurt each other too much. Love that deep wounded and bruised and destroyed. The loss of her had brought him to his knees, turned him hollow for decades.
Far better to stick with the safe choices.
Then one night, the entire world turned dark in a roar of silken silence as opulent as a panther’s fur and he knew. “Zanaya has ascended,” he said to Avelina while staring up at that luminous sky, while a melody beyond the ability of any musician to mimic filled the air . . . along with scents as lush as Zanaya’s night. “My love has ascended.”
Because no matter what, that would never not be true: she was his love and would always be his love. That had never been the problem between them. And now, she was his equal in power.
Hope he’d believed long dead unfurled its wings inside him, the youth he’d once been alive in the scarred heart of the archangel.
* * *
* * *
On the other side of the world, Zanaya’s back snapped out of the vicious arch into which it had been bent in the air, her wings back under her control. The power that had poured out of her mouth and eyes to drench the sky in midnight shut off, but the windstorm that held her aloft did not.
It cradled her, brutal power and speed that exhilarated.
Laughing at the primal beauty of it, she danced in the tempests before sucking them into herself. It was pain that sent her spiraling to land hard on the ground—and it was ecstasy that had her hair streaming back as scents sensual and wild wove over her skin, through her veins.
Her outward form may not have changed, but she was far bigger than she’d ever been, could touch every point in the universe.
And she knew what she was now, what she’d become.
An archangel. One of the Cadre of Ten.
A being unkillable by anyone but a fellow archangel.
18
Alexander planned to go to Zanaya, court her until she was his, this time forever, but she came to him mere days after her ascension, just flew into his arms. Their kiss was a joyous homecoming, tears streaking both their faces. So overwhelmed was he that it took him a moment to notice the flickers of silvery light in her irises that must’ve come with ascension.
Earthbound stars. As if she truly was a piece of the night sky.
“Zani, my Zani.” He pressed his forehead to her own. “Archangel Zanaya.”
No one had predicted this, for while Zanaya was a power, so were multiple other angels of her age. Yet it made perfect sense to him that it would be her. Zanaya had always burned as bright as a star, magnetic and impossible to ignore. Now, that star controlled a territory, and they were equals on every level—including raw power.
They were also archangels who couldn’t be in the same space for long periods of time without stirring violence in one another, but they made it work. It got ragged at times, and they did fight, but they were a unit for a hundred of the best years of his life . . . until war broke out among the Cadre and they found themselves on opposite sides of the issue, neither willing to back down.