I set it down, rubbed my wrists together, and held my wrist out to him, finding his eyes, feeling the muscles around my lips lift up. A smile. Not a big one, but enough for his eyes to track.
His beautiful, haunted blue eyes remained on my mouth for a long time. Even when he leaned down and smelled my wrist, his eyes remained locked in place.
“Divine,” he hummed, causing mypussy, as he called it, to pulse.
My eyes fell to his lips, a new feeling filling my stomach, one that caused my heart to flutter and my head to spin. Nervousness, I think. But why was I nervous? It was Azrael.
I pressed my thighs together, trying to ease the discomfort between them as I lowered my wrist and turned back to the box, finding my final present.
I could feel his eyes on me, watching my every move as I reached in and pulled it out. I pushed the box to the side and set the bag down, gently pulling out the thin red paper. When I was sure I had gotten the last of it out, I leaned over, trying to peek inside only to freeze when I caught sight of it.
I glanced to Azrael and back, my heart pounding, my entire body filling with feathers as I reached in, my fingers brushing by the softest fur I had ever touched in my entire life.
I wrapped my hand around it and pulled it out carefully, the bag falling to the side as I held it up in front of me.
It was a rabbit. The whitest rabbit I had ever seen. It was wearing a little floppy muddy brown hat with a feather sticking out of the purple ribbon around the base, it had a black and red bowtie on, and its ears were as long as it was.
There was a shape on each paw too. Shapes I recognized from playing card games over the years. There was a red heart on its right arm paw, a black spade on the left, a red diamond on the left foot paw, and a black club on the right.
It even had big glass eyes, the exact color of Azrael’s.
It was absolutely perfect in every way.
My eyes found his as naturally as if I had been looking at him my entire life.“Mine?”I wanted to ask him.
He was watching me carefully, nodded once in response, and that was it.
I felt the muscles around my lips tighten again, the corners turning up slightly. I tightened my grip around the rabbit and hugged it close, tilting my head into its soft fur, Azrael’s scent filling my nose.
I inhaled deeply, my entire body warming from my toes to my head. Out of everything I had ever gotten, this was my absolute favorite.
“There’s more,” he told me quietly, his voice changing into a tone I hadn’t heard before.
My eyes found his lips. More? What else could there possibly be? I had everything I could ever dream of now.
He gestured towards the rabbit. “Each paw belongs to the recent additions to the family. They will be your friends. Eventually.”
There was a burning behind my eyes as they flicked to his. I could be friends with them?
He angled his chin. “The club is the mouse, the spade belongs to the rose, the diamond is the daffodil’s, and the heart is yours. If you press the symbols, they will have a recording of their voice. I spliced together some of the things they’ve said so you can hear them, decide how you feel about them through their tones and words, just as you do with everyone else. The heart doesn’t have anything yet.”
I lowered the bunny and took it in, studying each paw before I set it on the table, leaning it back against the box, and finally pressed the club.
“The stars are bright, their words like songs among the broken hearts of the souls living beneath them,” the soft, melodic voice said and paused. “You are…everything to me. All of it. Every beat of my thrumming heart, every thought, every spark that has coursed through my blood.” Another pause. “We are meant to burn like them, you know.” Another short pause. “Kill them all.”
I looked over to Azrael.
“It was easier to find clips of her,” he explained. “It’s how she speaks. Like she was bred from Poe and Dickenson.” He thought about it a moment. “Poets this world would die for. She doesn’t want to be a part of the violence of my world, but neither did her husband. In fact, the cub was minutes away from putting down roots before he met her. She became a publisher of books, he chose to plant those roots anyway, although he does still go on far more assignments than we originally thought.”
My brows furrowed. Assignments?
He angled his chin. “Homework, but with guns.”
They hunted people? Is that why he was here? He didn’t ever have a true affiliation with this church, he chose to come here, to destroy it from the inside out. Everything made a little more sense knowing that. His anger towards their laws, his rebellion with them, his messing with the cameras and taunting Thomas. It was all because he was on an assignment.
Which meant I was a part of that assignment too, right? If he was using me for information.
I straightened, remembering how he had mentioned something about purpose. I was helping him take this church down to protect his Wonderland, and in the end, he was still mine. He still couldn’t take his eyes off me. So it didn’t matter the reason he was here, he was still mine.
