Authors: Nalini Singh
Distress bloomed on Vanhi’s face.
“You didn’t mean something to her. You meant
everything
.” Cupping Mahiya’s face, she said, “I have kept another secret from you, one I was enjoined by your mother to keep, for I was there at your birth.”
29
M
ahiya blinked away her tears, her world a kaleidoscope. “I was not ripped from my mother’s womb?”
“No, no.” Vanhi’s distress grew. “I made sure Nivriti’s birthing was as easy as it could be for a woman who lay in a cell.” Fingers trembling, she brushed back Mahiya’s hair. “It was after the birth, when you’d been taken from her that I was alone in the room with your mother for a bare few moments. She whispered to me that she would leave her child a gift, and she made me promise to give you that gift at the right time.”
“What is it?” she asked, trembling at the idea of a link to her mother.
Vanhi’s laugh was waterlogged. “Mahiya, such a beautiful name, don’t you think? One I suggested to Neha.”
Mahiya had always taken her name to be a cruel joke on Neha’s part, for it meant happiness, joy . . . and sometimes, beloved. “My mother gave me my name?” It was a gift no one could ever take away from her.
“Yes, but the second part, I had to keep secret for Neha would not have permitted it.” The anguish of a woman who loved the archangel but saw the lack in her.
Mahiya leaned forward, a hundred butterflies in her blood. “What is the second part?”
“Geet,” Vanhi whispered. “Your name is Mahiya Geet.”
Joyous song . . . beloved song.
Her heart shattered from the inside out. Far from being a mockery, her name was a treasure, a last gift from a mother who hadn’t, she knew without asking, been allowed to hold her newborn daughter. “Thank you,” she whispered to Vanhi through a throat swollen with emotion.
“I thought to tell you earlier . . . but you weren’t ready,” Vanhi said, taking her into her arms. “Now you are. I think the world will tremble to hear your song, sweet girl.”
* * *
B
eloved song.
Mahiya squeezed the railing of the balcony and turned to look at the man who was the only one other than Vanhi who knew her true name. She’d had to tell someone, and Jason . . . he would keep her secrets.
Close to midnight, the skies were empty aside from the sweep of the outer sentries. Here, within the walls of the fort, it was quiet but for the night insects, the wind still as a glassy pond, the air cool but not cold. The man beside her was a part of the night, his wings near indistinguishable from the shadows.
“It suits you,” he said, one of those wings brushing her own as he spread them behind her.
Biting back a responsive shiver, she laughed, the sound soft and intimate in the dark. “I am not the most gifted of singers, but I don’t care.”
A tug in her hair, Jason’s fingers unraveling the neat knot at her nape with exquisite patience, each golden pin put on the railing in order, until they shimmered in the dark and her hair tumbled down her back and over her wings. Mahiya trembled. She had been born in a time when a woman did not put down her hair in front of anyone but her lover, and some part of her was that girl still.
It was an intimacy they shared beneath the starlit sky.
When he slid his hand under her hair to close over her nape from behind, she expected him to tug her back for a kiss, but he just rubbed his thumb over her skin before running his knuckles down the centerline of her back and returning to lean on the balcony on his forearms, his wing lying heavily against her own. “I can sing.”
It was the last thing she’d expected to hear from him, this man who threatened to splinter her defenses until she repeated her mother’s tale of love unrequited. Yet now that he’d spoken, her mind whispered with half-remembered fragments of conversations overheard.
“A voice more beautiful than Caliane’s they say.”
“. . . made my heart break.”
“Purity, that is Jason’s voice.”
The speakers had all been more than four hundred years old. “I would hear you,” she whispered.
“I have not sung for many years.”
“Did something happen to still your song?” she asked, unwilling to back away when this was the first time he’d spontaneously offered her a glimpse into the mystery of him.
His reply was slow in coming, but she didn’t take his silence for anger, knowing Jason was a man who felt no need to clutter the air with words. Instead, tempted by the way his head was below her own as he leaned down, she reached out to undo the tie that held his hair in its usual queue. It fell like black water around his face, and he didn’t stop her when she began to smooth it back to lie over his shoulders. “You have such beautiful hair.”
“I prefer yours.”
His hand fisted in her hair, his lips on her throat.
Thighs clenching, she ran her fingers over his scalp. “Then we are well matched.”
He arched a little into her touch. “The only songs in my heart were ones that made the Refuge drown in tears. So I stopped.”
Having not expected such an unvarnished answer, she was momentarily thrown, her fingers going motionless. She had the panicked feeling of a chance slipping through her fingertips, an opportunity forever lost. “Did it hurt you to stop?” she asked, grabbing at that chance with grim determination.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It was akin to cutting off a limb, but such song was not good for me.”
Frowning, she parted her lips to ask why, then stopped. Jason was a man draped in shadows—to give voice to the darkness within . . . yes, it would not be good for him to drench himself in it. “If you ever find something worth singing for again,” she said, a silent, fierce hope in her heart for his song, “I hope you will invite me to listen.”
Jason pushed off the railing to stand at his full height, folding his wings to his back at the same time. Already, she missed the warm weight against her, but then he dipped his head and the warmth turned into a black fire that kissed her bloodstream and spread into every cell of her body.
There would be no forgetting Jason.
* * *
H
e’d led her into the bedroom, but when he stopped at the foot of the bed, she raised her fingers to the buttons of his shirt after undoing the strap of the sword harness across his chest. The way he’d taken control the previous night, she worried he wouldn’t accept her desire to discover what pleased him, but he played with her hair as she unbuttoned the shirt to display the beauty of his body.
Each soft tug on her scalp as he twisted a loose, heavy curl around his finger, released it, made her heart skip a beat. But it was the ridges and valleys of his body that had her sighing in feminine pleasure as she pulled the sides of the shirt apart to splay her fingers over his skin. His hand fisted in her hair, but he didn’t call a halt to her exploration.
Delighted, she shaped the heated steel of him, caressing the heavy muscle that spoke to his strength and speed. It was a quirk of angelic biology that the incredibly powerful muscles needed to support flight didn’t overwhelm the upper body. Instead they lay subtle and fiercely strong beneath the skin.
But Jason’s body, it told a different story, that of a warrior who needed to do maneuvers in the sky flight muscles alone wouldn’t accommodate. “Can you use your sword in flight?”
“I’d be useless as a fighter otherwise,” he murmured, lifting her fingers to the straps on his shoulders that helped hold the sword harness to his back.
Taking the silent instruction, she undid the sleek but strong buckle, repeated the act on the other side, the leather soft from use. “Are you ever without your sword?”
“No.” Removing harness and sword, he placed them beside the bed.
Within arm’s reach.
“It’s my primary weapon.”
“Yes, I understand.” Pushing aside his shirt, she rubbed her fingers over the light red marks created by the leather. Such a thing would be nothing to an angel of Jason’s strength, but she did not like seeing his body abused in even so small a way.
Having kicked off her sandals in the living area, where Jason had left his boots, she rose on bare toes to press her lips to one of the marks. Jason’s free arm came around her waist, but he didn’t halt her movements when she kissed her way across to the other marks. “I could do this for hours,” she said, addicted to the feel of him, the taste of him.
Jason’s response was again unexpected. “If that’s your wish.”
It made her shiver, the idea of having this man in her bed, hers to explore. Dropping down flat on her feet again, she didn’t give him time to change his mind and walked around to undo the plain buttons that held the wing slits closed. His shirt fell to the floor seconds later, his wings stunning arcs of heavy black.
She ran her fingers over the shadowy perfection of his feathers, suddenly shy. But he was already unbuckling his belt, the metallic sounds harsh, intimate in the quiet of the bedroom. Breathing ragged, she walked around to take over the task, her fingers brushing his. “I’ll do it.” It was a whisper, but Jason’s hand fell away . . . to rise, undo the buttons on the shoulders of her tunic.
Sliding his belt out of the loops, she dropped it to the floor, cooperated with him to strip away her tunic. Her breasts, small as they were, didn’t need support, and she wore only a camisole beneath. It took Jason but a moment to remove that from her body, run the back of his hand over one taut mound. “Beautiful.”
A tremor rippling over her skin at the low murmur, she undid the button of his jeans, ran her fingers along his navel. His muscles contracted. It intoxicated her, his response, and she had the craving to know every touch, every caress that made this strong, sensual man shudder in pleasure. Swallowing at the enthralling thought, she brushed her fingers over his zipper and the hard ridge beneath.
Jason’s demanding mouth was suddenly on her own, his grip on her hair holding her in place. She didn’t know how it happened, but her pants were stripped from her seconds later, and she found herself lying on her back on the bed with Jason between her legs, the heavy denim of his jeans rubbing against her skin as he devoured her mouth.
She hooked one leg around his hip, opened her mouth to the wet seduction of his kiss, licked her tongue against his in molten desire. Groaning, he settled more heavily against her, the cold metal of his zipper pressing into the skin of her abdomen as his wings spread above her in a caress of midnight.
“Later.” A husky word against her lips. “You can touch all you wish later.”
The rough promise made her melt. “I intend to.”
His hand on her breast, squeezing a fraction too softly. Perhaps it was shameless, but she put her hand over his, increased the pressure. Her reward for such brazenness was piercing pleasure, his lips hot and damp on her neck as he petted her breast, rubbed her nipple. Holding his head to her, she twisted against him, frustrated by the fabric that separated them. “Jason, your jeans.”
A sudden chill as he rose to get rid of his remaining clothing. The sight of him in the faint moonlight that entered the room through a high window, formed of fine designs cut into the stone itself, stole her very breath. He was a work of art, every part of him honed to a deadly edge. Raising her arm, she held out her hand, calling him back to bed.
He returned in a primal wave of heat that took her over. Kissing his way down her body, he hooked his fingers into the satin and lace of her panties to tug them off, throw them aside.
A wet, suckling kiss pressed just above her mound before he spread her thighs . . .
Mahiya arched off the bed under the stark intimacy of his next caress, his mouth tasting her most delicate flesh with lush eroticism as his hands held her open for his—
their
—pleasure. Her hands gripped at the sheets, her wings fluttering like creatures trapped, and her breath, it became a sob.
He deepened the kiss, one of his fingers sliding into her sheath.
The sensual intrusion tipped her over, the pleasure so intense, it stole her voice.
Moving up her quivering body with a slow attention to detail that left no inch of her skin untouched, untasted, her nipples hard little berries for him to roll against his tongue, her breasts left slick and wet to rub against the muscled beauty of his chest as he reached her lips at last.
First, he kissed the corners of her eyes, tasting the salt of the pleasure that shimmered over her skin still. But when she turned her lips to his, he accepted the invitation with raw hunger, one of his hands running down her waist to grip her thigh, bring it over his hip, opening her for him.
And then he was pushing into her, slow and insistent. She gasped, her flesh swollen, but there was no hurt. Only a near-painful need to have him inside her. Wrapping her other leg around his body, she pressed, urging him deeper.
“Mahiya.”
Her spymaster’s control fractured.
30
I
n the hours before returning to Mahiya, Jason had flown a considerable distance out from the fort to speak to an angelic couple just returned to the territory after a sojourn in the Refuge. Having received his message, they’d asked him to meet them at the lodge where they rested, as they planned to begin the second leg of their journey at first light—to their home at the other end of Neha’s territory.
He’d been lucky to locate the pair; they spent much of their time exploring the world, having earned a respite from their duties after millennia of service. Though the two were unquestionably loyal to their archangel, they also had an unhidden fondness for Raphael.
“We watched him grow from a child into an archangel. He was never too proud to talk to those of us who were weaker, even when his power eclipsed ours while he was but a babe.”
That fondness extended to the Seven, and the two had been happy to answer Jason’s questions about the vampire with scarlet hair, though he’d made the pattern of questioning such that the most important query was but one among many. He didn’t want a careless word to spook their prey. What he’d learned had been . . . interesting, until he could almost taste the answer on his tongue.
A shift against him, Mahiya’s fingers flickering on his chest. Her hair slid across his arm and shoulder at the same instant, one of her wings half on, half off his body as he lay on his back, both hands under his head.
“How long did I sleep?” she asked without lifting her head from his shoulder, her voice husky.
He glanced at the moonlight filtering through the high lattice window and said, “Not long. Perhaps an hour.” An hour as he listened to her breathe, as he traced quiet patterns on her skin and felt his heartbeat slow, lulled by the rhythm of hers. It had been an unexpected thing, and it had caused a violent response in him, a raw urging to get out, to get free.
But Jason was almost seven hundred years old, understood what drove him—he’d looked into the abyss of his soul, seen the lonely, forgotten boy looking back at him. He knew that boy trusted no one and nothing, knew he looked upon any kind of an emotional bond with suspicion, expected nothing but pain from any such relationship.
That boy, he was so
afraid
.
It was a truth about himself Jason had come to terms with long ago. That scared boy didn’t rule his conscious mind, but was so embedded in his subconscious that he often didn’t know why he acted as he did until the deed was done and his mind cleared again. Tonight, he’d fought the urge to leave when it hit him, because being in bed with a sleeping Mahiya was a pleasure all its own.
He liked that her scent warmed and seemed to soak into his own skin, liked that he could twine her hair lazily around his fingers and play with it as he thought, liked that she made tiny little noises and burrowed deeper into him every so often—as if she adored being with him. He almost felt real, as if he was a normal man, one capable of loving a woman and holding her close.
It was an illusion, but it was an illusion he was willing to believe in for this night.
“Hmm.” Reaching down, Mahiya tugged up the sheet tangled around her thighs to her waist, before placing her hand over his heartbeat again. Her wing rose a fraction as her mouth and jaw moved against his skin in a yawn, and the silver light of the moon kissed the feathers to jewel brightness.
Before she’d fallen asleep, those wings had shimmered in his vision as she spent an hour touching and kissing his body with unhidden pleasure. Drunk on the tactile sensations, he’d had to coax her to straddle him, his shy Mahiya, but once there, she’d used her position to caress him with sweet feminine delight.
Living in the illusion, he moved one hand to run his fingers over the sensitive arch. She shivered, her wing floating down to lie across his body once more. “You could make me agree to commit a great many sins with those fingers, Jason.”
“There are no sins in pleasure.” It was something Dmitri had once said to him, a sardonic twist to his mouth, the mockery directed inward.
Mahiya’s soft laugh changed the words, turned them sensual and playful. “I think I shall make that my motto when I am free, and live the life of an unabashed hedonist.”
Images of her clothed in raw silks and exquisite cashmere, her body petted and smoothed with exotic creams, her lips closing over a delicious morsel as she lay on satin sheets flashed through his mind. Sliding a fingertip down her spine, he spread his hand on her lower back, his fingers just brushing the curves below. “I would be happy to massage you with scented oils.” Until her skin gleamed and she lay boneless beneath his touch.
Her laugh was startled this time, huskier. Rubbing her cheek against his skin, she said, “Dangerous man—I’m not certain I’d survive the pleasure.” Pushing up against his chest, she looked down at him, her hair tumbling over one smooth shoulder, her breasts hidden by the sheet she’d pulled up to hold against her chest. Always so modest, though as a lover, she gainsaid nothing he demanded.
“Vanhi,” she said, expression becoming solemn, “said something else important. I forgot to tell you with everything else. She thought she might have seen the vampire with bone-pale skin and scarlet hair once. Long ago.”
Jason listened, added that fact to the information he already had.
“So?” she prompted when he didn’t respond. “I know you were out doing what you do earlier. What did you learn?” A scowl. “Do not think to keep me in the dark, Jason.”
He should’ve reminded her she held no cards to play, but he knew that would hurt her, and he didn’t want to hurt this princess with her heart strong enough to survive three hundred years with an archangel who saw her only as a means to an end. “There is plenty of moonlight.”
Making an exasperated sound, she dipped her head to kiss him, sinking her teeth into his lower lip in a bite that didn’t so much as sting. “This is not the time for spymaster humor.”
Were she another woman, he’d have thought she attempted to use the afterglow of sex to sway him, but this was Mahiya—who had grown up in a hotbed of lies but chose not to use those tactics. Caressing her with the hand he had on her lower back, he said, “I found a couple who remember seeing a vampire who fits the description in Neha’s court three to four hundred years ago.”
“They can’t be more certain?” she asked, a humming kind of tension in her frame.
“At five thousand years old . . .”
Mahiya sighed. “Like Vanhi, their memories are tucked away in secret corners of their minds.” A thoughtful pause, before she said, “Just over three hundred years ago, Eris was exiled to his palace, and my mother was executed.”
After being kept alive long enough to give birth to the child she carried in her womb.
The words hung unspoken between them.
“They weren’t the only ones,” Jason said, wondering how much she knew. “Those who had known of the affair and helped Eris and Nivriti were executed; others who were simply loyal to Nivriti were exiled.”
Mahiya pushed away from his chest to sit upright, her wing brushing across his body, the warmth of her suddenly gone. “A man on the edge of their circle,” she murmured, “would’ve been considered a hanger-on. Exile, then.”
“It’s a workable conclusion.” To focus only on one possibility when it wasn’t yet a certainty was to create blind corners where the enemy could hide. “The question is, why would he expose himself to you?”
“A sense of residual loyalty perhaps.” Tawny eyes vivid as a cat’s in the darkness met his, the potential locked within her body a luminous brilliance. “But there is another question.”
“Which is?” Jason got the same sense of power from Mahiya that he had from a young Illium. It might take her longer than the blue-winged angel to grow into that power—her mother’s daughter in that perhaps, but given room to breathe, to develop, Mahiya would become an angel to be reckoned with . . . and he had the sudden, blinding thought that he wanted to witness the change, watch her spread her wings.
“How,” she said now, “did he get the box to the temple?”
It was an astute question. “Some vampires can climb like spiders,” he said, having seen a grinning Venom scale the Tower one moonless night after he and Illium made a bet, “but the chances of being caught would’ve been very high.” Not only did angelic guards sweep the area, the sentinels who watched over Guardian Fort had a wide field of view.
“He could’ve used the tunnels—Venom said he didn’t see any other footprints along the route he used, but I’ve heard it’s a labyrinth.”
“I’ll have him check them again.” He reached for the cell phone he’d placed on the bedside table after pulling it from his discarded jeans.
“Now?”
“It’s the best time.” No one would worry overmuch over a vampire walking about in the night, much less one known to be favored by women.
As it was, he heard a soft female sigh in the background when Venom answered. “No problem,” the other man said. “I’ve just fed, have plenty of energy.”
Jason heard the satiation in the vampire’s tone, knew he’d fed from the vein—and assuredly from a very willing female. “Watch your back.” Sex could cloud even the sharpest mind, and while Neha liked Venom, he remained one of the Seven.
The sound of rustling, as if Venom was getting out of bed. “Don’t worry. She’s a delicious playmate, but all she wanted to pump was my cock, not my brain.”
“Will you be able to check every possible route up to Guardian?”
“I can get it done before dawn.”
Hanging up soon afterward, Jason said, “You think the box was flown there,” to the woman beside him, her expression pensive.
“Yes.” Mahiya took the sheet with her as she got off the bed, the filaments of her feathers a thousand soft kisses across his skin. Disappearing into her dressing room, she returned clothed in a vivid blue robe tied at the waist.
He’d already pulled on his pants, though he’d left off his shirt and sword—the latter within reach, as it always was. Putting his back to the solid wall beside a small window of stained glass, he watched her walk to open that window and look beyond, bathed in the moonlight.
“A teddy bear, it’s either a silly romantic gift,” she whispered at long last, “or the kind of thing you give to a child.”
He thought of the feather of blue green he’d found the night of Arav’s murder, of the fact that Nivriti had inherited the ability to mesmerize, and he could not discount the impossibility behind the troubled look on Mahiya’s face. “What has Neha told you about your mother’s execution?”
“That she began her death screaming and begging for her life.” Her fingers tightened so hard on the window ledge that her bones pushed up against skin. “
‘I watched my dear sister’s organs spill out of the gaping hole that had been her womb and the blood pour off the stubs of her wings, then left her to starve to death
.
’
That’s what Neha said to me when I asked about my mother.” She swallowed. “Vanhi says she lied about the manner of my birth, but Vanhi had to leave after I was born. Neha could have done exactly as she said.”
Warmth, a hand on her cheek, a thumb on her jaw, the pressure gentle but inexorable. Turning, she found herself the focus of eyes of near obsidian that burned with a dark flame that had her heart skipping a beat.
Jason’s thumb moved gently across the dip of her chin. “As we see from Eris, from you, Neha knows how to hold a grudge.”
Mahiya sucked in a breath, for she’d expected Jason to argue against the painful hope inside her chest. “But to have kept my mother alive all this time out of spite?” She shook her head. “Why would she do that?”
“The same reason she did it to Eris—love and hate intertwined. You tell me Nivriti was her twin. That is a bond of the soul.”
Mahiya thought back to a day she’d come upon Neha and Eris in the courtyard when they’d believed themselves alone. She should’ve turned, walked away, but she’d been caught by the tableau they made: Neha, her expression young and vulnerable in a way Mahiya had never seen, allowing Eris to tip up her chin with his finger, tease a smile from her lips.
Of course, that moment hadn’t lasted, the past too crushing a weight to allow such fragile seeds to sprout, but—“I think if he hadn’t died, Neha would have allowed him out. Perhaps even soon.” She turned to face Jason, his hand sliding to cup the side of her neck. “Anoushka’s death hit her hard. She began to visit Eris more and more.”
“There were rumors she was trying to get herself with child.”
“I can’t give you an answer as to the truth of that, but what I believe is that she needed the comfort of the man who’d fathered her child—and Eris, to his credit, did give her that comfort.” How much had been real, and how much a fantasy created in order to get into Neha’s good graces, she didn’t know. Whatever it had been, it had given Neha some surcease—and who was Mahiya to gainsay the choices of a man who’d spent three centuries locked in pretty chains, even if he had made his own bed?
Releasing his hold on her, Jason shifted to lean one shoulder against the wall. “I’m not certain how long any freedom would’ve lasted. I’ve been able to confirm that Audrey was warming his bed.” A pause. “If she was the first and he lasted three hundred years before breaking”—Jason’s tone made it clear he thought otherwise—“then he may have been a stronger man than we credit.”
Mahiya thought again of that vulnerable look on Neha’s face and wondered if a woman with so much love in her heart would’ve eventually been able to forgive every trespass. “It matters little now. Eris is gone, and someone is either playing a sick game with me, or . . .” The words lodged in her throat, too heavy, too
important
to come out.
* * *
I
hope she lives.
Jason didn’t speak the thought aloud, but regardless of how many complications it would create, he hoped that Mahiya got a miracle. He understood what it was to grow up without a mother, but he’d at least had a whisper of time with his own.
“Jason, baby, what in the world are you doing?”
He gave his mother a long-suffering look and paused in his labors. “Planting coconut trees.”