“Oh, she’s a smartass, now.” The drawl of his accent fluttered against my hair.
Slipping my palms between us, I pressed them against his pecs. “Seriously, Ry.”
A growl rumbled in his throat. “It drives me crazy when you call me that.”
I shot him a look. Eyes alight, he dished me one right back—attention flicking over every inch of my face, landing on my throat, where my skyrocketing pulse was flittering in that hollow part of my neck. Ugh. I was doomed.
Tucking my head under his chin, I rested my cheek in the open collar of his shirt.
He wrapped his arms around me tighter, cocooning me against his broad chest. “Never again.”
I breathed him in, the faint traces of leather, sea salt, and pine. The scent of us. The scent of home.
“Never again,” I repeated.
Epilogue
Akosua, Angel of Fire
She was used to the warm, golden kiss of the fire, but in this realm, it was all wrong. Here, it was blue, lifeless. Cold.
Akosua withdrew from her place before the hearth and resumed pacing the tower she’d been locked in. Her clever brown eyes swept over the courtyard beyond the row of slits they called windows. A horde of demons stalked the perimeter of the castle, horns and hooves and wings jutting out of their mismatched armor.
How this realm stayed fortified was beyond her.
When they weren’t stabbing each other in the heart, its wretched inhabitants were playing dice, drinking themselves into oblivion, or daring each other to jump off the drawbridge. None ever survived the fall.
Fools. All of them, she thought.
Her gaze tracked the blood that smeared the ground below the windows. A clump of what looked to be skin and perhaps hair was wedged between the cobblestones.
Must have been what was left of the last guest.
A being made of hellfire and shadow swept through the purple sky. It landed in the field beyond the battlements, its deep roar shaking the windowpanes.
One of their sentries returning from patrol, she presumed.
The tops of dueling axes and swords glinted in the endless twilight: the closest things she ever saw to stars.
Here in Chthonia, she never witnessed a sunrise or sunset. It never got fully dark, it never got fully light. The realm was stuck. She was stuck. She was?—
She slammed her palms onto the stone windowsill, stopping herself.
Spiraling would only blow her cover, and then she’d end up in a fiery pit or on one of the many spikes that lined the road.
Hand pressed against her diaphragm, she inhaled deeply, closed her eyes, and willed herself to breathe.
Akosua yearned to hear the calming words of her archangel sisters. Instead, she was met with the constant barrage of the demons’ thoughts. It took all of her remaining will to block their twisted fantasies, their absurd questions, their croaky inflections out of her head.
It was enough to drive the sanest mind mad.
Even when she didn’t hear them, she felt them—invisible claws raking through her brain as if it were a mine they could pillage and ransack.
Instead of Gaia’s and Fei’s familiar voices flowing through her mind like a soft wind, she heard a jewelry box chirp. Followed by a creakkk from the wooden four-poster bed and a rattle from the armoire’s drawers.
At night, an unseen presence pulled the silk sheets off the mattress.
Everything in this room, in this godforsaken realm, was possessed. Cursed.
