“Rafe!”
“Come harder,” he says, and sucks her clit again.
“I can’t. It’s too good.”
“There’s more. Find it.”
She grinds against him as an inferno of pleasure rises in her, igniting every cell. And he’s right. It’s happening. She didn’t think she could go deeper into pleasure, but Rafe is taking her there. To the point where it feels like her entire body is soaring, like she’s falling to thebottom of the universe. Where there’s nothing else in the world. She’sstillcoming. Harder now, deeper and longer than seems humanly possible. It only makes sense because the mouth on her is anything but human. She grips his hair to hold him in place. Just in case this feeling never ends, she needs to keep him right here where he belongs.
And then, slowly, blissfully, her orgasm ebbs to a profound, bone-numbing state of deep, pleasurable calm. Like she’s about to drift off into sleep. But she doesn’t want to, not before Rafe—
Kisses her.
“Mind reader,” she murmurs into his lips, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“That one was easy,” he says, and even though her eyes are closed, she can hear the smile in his voice. He folds her in his arms so they’re spooning. And for just a second, Dez lets herself feel absolutely good.
Grief is out there, pain is real, an unknowable war lies on the horizon, but right now, in Rafe’s arms, nothing matters but that he keeps holding her. Just like this.
“I’VE BEEN THINKING,”DEZ SAYSto Rafe on a cold January morning as they cross the moonlit courtyard. “That place in the Vault I fell into—what is it really?”
It’s been two months since Mo died, since Dez learned Acheron’s secrets, since she decided to stay, and everything has changed. Rafe takes her questions seriously now, answers them honestly. It feels like they’re on the same side.
It’s changed her life, but it hasn’t made it easier. She grieves her brother every day. And the first-years’ workload is so impossible, it feels like they’re being set up to fail. Dez no longer works in the kitchen, and she’s stopped going to Kohenet for classes every morning, but the faculty still haunt the first-years’ Lenses with spot checks most afternoons. Every time they visit Dez, they remind her she’s behind everyone else.
“It really is a data hub,” Rafe says. His arms around Dez’s waist, which is how they often walk now. In public. Though they’re not a couple. Just an angel and a mortal everyone knows are hooking up to the brink of death. “But it’s not the kind you’re familiar with. It’s a storage room for souls.”
Dez nods. She had an instinct this was what he’d say. “You told me I fell in because I tripped where the platform was cracked—”
“You did. I suspect because you were so invested in the scene playing on your Lens, you wanted to become a part of it. We’ve known from your first introduction to the Vault that your mind was capable of overriding the system. I think, that day you fell, you also shattered your Lens’s foundation.”
“No matter how many times Dr. Ezekiel fixes it, the crack keeps coming back.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Rafe says. “We’ll find a better solution.”
“No.” Dez turns to face him. He’s so pretty as the snow drifts between them, his dark hair framing his face, the snow caught in his long, thick lashes melting like her bones do when he takes her to bed. “I want to go back there.”
“Dez.” His eyes run over her, hungry again as if he hadn’t just eaten her out for an hour. “No way—”
“I think it’s holding me back,” she says. “Slowing me down.”
“What is?”
“My fear that I’ll fall in again, that I’ll be so immersed in a film that the same thing will happen. I’ll break it again and fall through.” She presses a hand to his chest, thrilling at the muscles there. “What if you’re not there to catch me?”
He trails his fingertips down the side of her face, sending a surging river of heat through her. “I’ll always catch you.”
“Not if you’re not there.” Dez steps away from him. Recently, Rafe’s been AWOL more often than not when she’s needed him in the Vault. “Where have you been these last few weeks?”
“In your bed with my face between your legs.”
That part, she likes. Most nights, he hovers at her casement until she lets him in, staying until she’s spent and drifts off to sleep. She’s always fantasized about being with an older man with confidenceand experience, but a millennia-old angel with the ripped body of a twenty-eight-year-old? It’s the erotic jackpot, lucky sevens ringing through the cosmos.
It’s what Rafe’s doing when he’s not in her bed that’s the mystery.
He never stays over. And during the day, recently, he’s a ghost.
“I need your help. I’m drowning in my assignments. And I don’t feel safe in my Lens.”
