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The stranger’s attention never leaves me.
“Call me Malgrave.” His mouth barely moves around the words, but that voice still seems to get everywhere, crawling beneath my cut and settling somewhere I don’t want it. “And my jurisdiction expanded this morning.”
Well, there it fucking is.
Scar shifts closer, but Malgrave doesn’t bother looking at him again. Those black eyes stay fixed on mine from barely an arm’s length away. “The Council convened at midday. A hazard was cataloged. Hellfire fused with Holy Light has never, in all recorded history, occurred inside a single throat.”
My stomach tightens.
He means the clearing, the tear.
Sentinel’s hand locked around the back of my neck while his Grace poured into me, and my roar carried both of us into the earth.
Malgrave’s gaze drops to my throat. “Tier One. Uncontained.” His eyes lift back to mine. “The vote was unanimous.”
Raze steps between us, his jaw set. “Carnage sealed a supernatural tear. He saved lives doing it. Everyone knows a rift in the earth could out us supernaturals to mortals.”
“He also tore a hole between planes that hasn’t fully closed,” Malgrave says like this shit should be obvious. “The how doesn’t interest the Council… only the what. Until containment is engineered, the source is bound.” Those empty eyes drop to me again. “Your voice, hellhound. All of it. The roar, the bark, even that growl you use when you’re trying to be threatening, thinking no one notices the smile that comes with it.”
My pulse kicks up hard enough that I can feel it in my molars.
Sentinel surges forward, his Grace lighting up the room. “You’re not fucking touching him!”
Chapter Four
CARNAGE
Heat punches across my back. I feel his power hit the bond between us first, a sudden rush of white-gold energy that catches against my hellfire and sends the beast beneath my skin surging forward.
Sentinel steps up beside me, shoulders rolling back as something tears through his shirt with a violent rip. His wings explode outward. Gold light floods the hallway as they snap open to their full span, forcing Scar to move back and sending Ruckus ducking out of the way with a sharp curse. Feathers flare, each one burning white-gold along the edges, and the air around us charges so hard the lights overhead flicker.
Sentinel moves in front of me.
Not completely.
Just enough.
Enough that I know exactly what the heavenly prick is doing.
Putting himself between Malgrave and me.
My hellhound comes fucking alive. Hellfire rolls hot beneath my ribs, answering the celestial power pouring off Sentinel, and for one dangerous second that thread between us pulls tight.
Heaven reaching for Hell.
Malgrave’s black eyes finally leave mine and settle on Sentinel. “The Council’s ruling stands with or without your blessing, angel.” He lifts one hand, fingers long and gray, nails black as pitch. “This will hurt considerably less if he doesn’t fight it.”
“Try it,” Sentinel says while gold flashes through the hallway. “See what fucking happens.”
Malgrave looks at him for a long moment before those black eyes return to me. “If I had come here to harm him, angel, we would not be having this conversation.”
“Funny. Taking his fucking voice sounds a lot like harm to me.”
“It is punishment.”
My hellhound pushes hard beneath my skin. “For what?” I snap. “Closing a fucking hole that was about to swallow half the goddamn clearing?”
“For creating it.”
