A tender smile curved Echo’s lips. “Yes, he’s my mate. He makes everything in my life so much better. Not like what you saw earlier, though,” she hastily added.
Nia smiled. “You mean the tiff?”
Echo huffed. “I love him more than life itself, but he’s too protective. If something’s wrong, he wants it put right immediately. How can I explain what’s wrong when I don’t know?”
“What do you mean?” She searched her twin’s wan features. “Are you ill?
“No…” Echo slumped against the backrest. “It’s more a sense of nagging that something’s not right. It’s hard to explain.”
“Maybe it was your subconscious preparing for our shocking meeting?” Nia teased.
She shot upright, eyes widening with disbelief. “How can you say that? Us finding each other after all these years could never be wrong. I think my mind’s just messed up a little after healing the veils in another realm?—”
“Nia?”
His voice was barely more than a whisper, but it resonated like a thunderclap within her.
Echo glanced behind them, then leaned forward with a smile and hugged her. “Talk to him,” she whispered. “I know it’s none of my business, but tell him how you feel.”
She rose, and Nia stood, facing him as Echo hurried away. Her heart careened around in her chest. Tell him how she felt?
It’s not like he didn’t know.
His footsteps crunched through the snow as he closed the distance between them. His quiet stare skimmed her face, and she rubbed her arms, trying to calm her racing heart.
“You’re cold. You should be indoors.”
“You came all this way to tell me that? I thought you already left,” she croaked out, her voice sounding like rusty nails on concrete.
“I needed to see you first.”
One last time?
While he might have wanted her, and her stupid heart longed for more, he never promised her forever.
“Why?”
A deep sigh escaped him. “Angels are not as mortals make us out to be?—”
“Yeah, I get it. Some are assholes wearing a halo.”
Humor flashed in his otherworldly eyes. She desperately searched his face for anything more?—
“I must go…”
His words were like a bullet to the heart, and she stumbled back a step, powerless to stifle the pain rupturing through her from the very core of her being.
Unable to watch him leave, she wheeled away.
He was in front of her, his expression pained. “Don’t cry,habibti.” He cupped her face in his palm, large enough to cover most of the left side, and he wiped her damp cheek. She didn’t even know she was crying. “I cannot bear that. Remember us as we were in the abbey…”
Lore gently brushed his fingertips along the slope of her cheek and down her jaw to trace the shallow dimple in her chin as if memorizing her features with his touch.
Oh, please, please…
He lowered his head and pressed his lips to her brow in a soft kiss. In a seamless shimmer, he vanished, leaving only his footprints in the snow. And her tears fell at the heart-wrenching reminder of the angel who couldn’t love her.
No matter what she said, she would have waited if he’d given her some hint he cared and wanted more.
