Earlier, he’d let her be, it wasn’t the time to talk. No longer.
The moment she walked out of the ward, he pushed away from the wall. She remained quiet as they made their way to the elevator. He was used to silence, but not one of this raw, hurting caliber that pierced him in the gut.
Once they left the hospital, he led her to the shadowy side street when she stopped him and lifted anguished eyes to his. “I shouldn’t have said what I did earlier. It’s not your fault you lost your emotions.”
He wasn’t prepared for that. “What else did Echo tell you?”
Slight color tinged her face that he knew who her informant was. “Just that—” Then she hastily defended the female. “She only told me because she saw how upset I was.”
“I know. I should have told you myself. I didn’t know how,” he admitted. “There’s something else…” he paused, uneasiness taking hold. But she had to know. He didn’t want that distance between them again. “I don’t possess a soul. It was taken from me. That’s why I lost my emotions.”
“What—why?” A shocked whisper.
“It was my punishment because I dared to save another from a cruel torture,” he said, voice flat. “He was brutalized anyway.”
“Who would do something so cruel?”
“One screwed-up Fallen son-of-a-bitch. Lucifer.”
Her mouth opened, then shut. Compassion flowed into her eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. With you, I have everything I need.You’ve given me what I lost and thought I would never again have.” He ran his knuckles down her jaw in a slow caress.
If he could, he’d keep her at his side twenty-four seven. He didn’t care how possessive that was of him, and it wasn’t because of the surge of emotions flowing through him when she was near. He craved every bit of her, her smile, her luscious body, hell, he wanted to be the very air she breathed—wanted every fucking thing. But he knew better than to say it.
“All that matters is you. You belong to me, Darci. Have done so from the moment I saw you.”
Faint color crept up her face. “Do you have to actually touch me to feel?”
And there was that, which would always come between them. He really didn’t want to go there again. “Darci—”
“Tell me. I want to understand.”
A sigh. “I feel a bit around you, but it’s more intense with skin contact.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment as if assimilating what he’d said, then those damp hazel eyes drifted over his face and lingered on his cheek. She reached up and caressed his jaw with tender fingers. “You have a bruise.”
Ah, Christ, there went that tightness in his chest again.
“Yeah, the job,” he said, tone gruff. He turned his head, kissed her fingers. Then he hardened his gaze. “Never refer to yourself as afuck buddyagain. I intensely dislike those words.” He would never reduce her to something that demeaning when she was his own personal little sun.
Unable to stop himself, he took her mouth in a tender kiss. Her short, breathy sighs made him unbearably hard, and before he forgot all common sense, he stepped back. With her face flushed and lips swollen from his kisses, at least he’d taken away the sorrow in her eyes.
It had just gone past midnight when he dematerialized them back to the castle.
“Blaéz,” she said as he shut their bedroom door behind him. “Michael mentioned psionics. What are—are they your enemies, too?”
It was the last thing he wanted to talk about now that he’d gotten over one hurdle. Not that he gave two shits about explaining what psionics were, what concerned him was where that conversation would eventually lead. For her to understand, he had to tell her the rest. He had to open his personal Pandora’s box and reveal more dark truths about his damn past that had left him a husk.
* * *
Darci waited. Blaéz leaned against the door. “No,” he finally said. “They aren’t our enemies, but a whole other problem. It’s about the prophecies of the Watchers.”
“Watchers?” Darci remembered reading about the angels that had died eons ago.
He nodded. “We had to find the Healer of the Veils and protect her. If she died, it meant other descendants of the Watchers, the psionics, would awaken. A curse the leader of the Watchers had set in place. So, we had to protect the Healer, but with a demon after her ability, things became complicated. Echo was abducted. She died.”
Her eyes widened in shock.“Echo died?”
