“Growly, I need you to tell me the truth. I know you did something to save me, after I took Ry’s smut. I know it was something dangerous… or forbidden.” I took a breath, fighting my own rising sense of panic at the fear on Mikhail’s face. I turned halfway, peering over my shoulder as I lifted my hair away, exposing the new feather that I knew lay there. “Did you give me this feather, Mikhail?” I didn’t ask the rest of my question, which was, “If you did, do you regret it now?” I wasn’t that brave.
His eyes closed, his shoulders slumping in a way I’d never seen, in an unspoken answer to both of my questions. I thought of taking it back, telling him I didn’t care, that we could keep it a secret. Though quite a few people knew already, and after the whole of Sanctuary saw him carry me out of The Merge, I had a feeling the rest might put it together.
I raised my hand to the spot and rubbed it lightly, wondering why that part of my neck felt more like it belonged to me than any other piece of this body. It was no more prominent than atattoo, and the nerves there were, if anything, more connected to the rest of me. Especially certain parts.
Maybe the feather had been his. But it was mine now, and I wasn’t giving it back.
Chapter 29
Mikhail
“Did you give me this feather, Mikhail?” Those impossibly green eyes blinked up at me, so full of trust and concern. So open and accepting. I did not deserve that look.
Instead of answering my little mate, I closed my eyes. I felt her fingertips move over the feather I’d placed at her nape. Felt the way she stroked it, and the answering tug in her heart… andher pleasure centers. A new blush crept over my cheeks, and I tasted the sharp acid of shame in the back of my throat.
As if that shame was the trigger for much worse, a rush of agony battered me like a tidal wave. My entire physical form felt as if I’d been flayed, stripped of my protective layer of power and left in a cold wind for hours. I hadn’t felt pain like this for so long; I’d almost forgotten how sharp-edged it could be. Saving Feather had weakened me, and carrying the smut I’d taken on down to Earth had compounded the problem. My wing joints ached from my quick journey back to Sanctuary when Gavriel had called for the emergency Assembly.
Worse than all that pain, mysoulached from the shadows I had seen enveloping the Earth, and the knowledge that the Great Gate was failing, and that evil would soon move into our haven. It was an imminent future I hadn’t been prepared to face.
Gavriel had told me it was bad, but I hadn’t visited the earthly realm in so long; I hadn’t truly understood. I knew now why my best friend had hardened in the past century, grown colder and more severe. Why he’d stopped singing entirely, and had become the angry, stern leader he was now. The mass of shadows that webbed the earth was enough to strip the voice from anyone with a heart. Who could find the breath to sing in a world so lost, so broken?
A part of me understood his metamorphosis. But all of me mourned the loss of the Gavriel I called my brother. And when he’d commanded me as leader of Sanctuary to go to Earth without leaving so much as a note for Feather, I’d hated him for it more than a little bit.
When I’d flown into The Merge and seen my small mate being manhandled, first by Vigor, and then Righteous—the one responsible for her pain and mine—it had taken every ounce of maturity I had gained over the millennia to keep from tearing hiswings away from his body for daring to hurt her. But what might truly break me lay ahead.
I raised my eyes at last. My mate had moved while I collected my thoughts, and now sat cross-legged on the bed near the far end of my hall, her hands fussing with the piled blankets. I stoked the fire, unable to meet her gaze as she repeated the question. “Did you give me this feather?”
“I did,” I replied at last. “You were dying. Your soul was almost gone, buried under the weight of Righteous’s smut. The only way I could save you, revive you, was by giving you a piece of pure angelic energy. I would have drawn it from the Well of Souls if it had been open. I’d given you my blood to assist your healing, but it wasn’t enough. Even giving you a bit of my flesh would not have been enough.”
She made a soft sound. “So, you gave me a feather? What’s different about that and your… blood? Flesh?” She shuddered lightly. “I’m sort of glad you didn’t turn me into a cannibal angel.” She waited for me to laugh, but I couldn’t. I had to confess my crime.
I exhaled, staring at the flickering flames as they rose. “In Sanctuary, with High Angeli, a feather is given to the one who is meant to be…”
“Your mate,” she supplied. “Like Arabella and Gavriel.”
I nodded. “Just so. Protectors may also gift them to one another when and if they choose to commit themselves eternally. But that is very rare. Usually, a feather is only shared when one of the High Angeli recognizes their soul’s mate, or when I create one for them. I made a choice to put… a piece of myself into you, even though you could not consent. Even though you are far too young for me to consider in such a way.”
She looked down, muttering almost inaudibly, “Not as young as you might think.” I ignored it. Even if she was as old as I suspected, she was still far too new to our world for me to havetaken such a liberty. And she needed to understand what I had done both now, and long ago.
“I took advantage of you to save you. But I never meant to follow through. To… pursue you in a romantic fashion, though the act of placing the feather there always stirs up some feelings of that nature. They may fade with time.” That was very nearly a lie; every moment that I knew her, I longed for her more. I was almost obsessed, and didn’t care.
I sat on the stool, my forearms resting on my thighs, disgusted with myself, sure she must be as well. I felt her approach, and then she lifted my face up to hers, her small hands on either side of my jaw. “So it’s a marriage of convenience,” she said, as she peered into my eyes as if searching for something lost. Her skin was exquisite, and I allowed myself to take in every beautiful, shining inch of her. “You felt sorry for me. You don’t want me… to merge with.”
I lifted my own hands to her heart-shaped face and spoke the truth, even though it damned me. “I want that more than you could ever imagine. But I will not take that from you.” I let out a laugh that sounded despairing even to my own ears. “And if we merged fully, I would probably unmake you unintentionally.”
“But you want to.” Those green eyes were so filled with uncertainty that my heart panged. “Even if it’s only because of the feather.”
“It’s not,” I said quickly. “It’s not just that.”
Her trembling lips curled upward. “You wantme?”
I dropped my hands and clenched them into fists. “I want you more than I have ever wanted anyone or anything in my life. To gaze upon you is to glimpse a love I’d thought lost to me for all time. I should know better—Idoknow better. But I can’t help it. Even before I gave you my feather, I… felt inappropriate things for you.”
She let out a nervous giggle. “Inappropriate feelings are sort of my specialty.” I waited for her to collect her thoughts, her eyes revealing so much more of her internal state than she could possibly know. My own heart began to ease, as I saw her come to a decision. “You want me. I want you. Everyone else is gonna think we’re perverts. Is that about it?”
“Oh, at the very least,” I ground out. I had been ignoring both the repeated distant hum of the whole host of Sanctuary expressing their disgust and alarm, and the physical knocking that filtered through the thick wood of the door, and now I muted them in my thoughts entirely. “If the door weren’t locked to all but me, I’m sure they would have torn it down and?—”
“I can open it, too,” she whispered. “No one else knows.”
