He hadn’t understood she meant that literally.

“I can’t remember,” the first guard said, a stricken expression in his eyes. “At the time, I had no consciousness of it, but later, when I was asked, I realized I had no memory of several hours of the night.”

The second guard told the same story.

Jason knew Venom had the capacity to mesmerize people—the vampire had gained it during his Making by Neha.

“Do you know of anyone else who possesses it?” he asked Mahiya that night.

“It’s a family trait,” she responded. “My mother was said to share it with Neha, though her abilities were otherwise dissimilar. I didn’t inherit it, but Anoushka did. Neha’s bloodline is an ancient one—I don’t know of any direct descendants with Anoushka dead, but there are some old ones who came before her who do not Sleep.”

Jason made a few calls, tracked down those forbearers. “The relationship is distant, and they’re all too weak to have killed even Shabnam.” The lady-in-waiting had been no power, but like all courtiers, she’d had a certain level of strength.

Mahiya frowned. “I can’t think of anyone else who is known to have that ability, but some angels are secretive about their strength.”

Yes, Jason thought, especially if the impact of the Cascade was rippling beyond the Cadre. “Did you discover anything?” She’d spent the last hours navigating the maze of afternoon and early evening court functions.

“A sense of unease,” she said. “Everyone is scared he or she will be the next target, and a number are making plans to leave the fort, but that’s all hot air. Neha will not forgive desertion, and they’re too self-obsessed to lose their place in the court.” She blew out a breath, rubbing at her forehead with her fingertips. “My head hurts from the inanity of it, and I have not one good piece of information to show for my efforts!”

“Enough,” Jason said. “We both need to spread our wings. Come.”

He allowed Mahiya to set the pace, to set their direction, shadowing her vibrant wings as she swept across the skies with the ease and grace of someone who knew the vagaries of the winds in the mountains, understood how the land interacted with the sky. She wasn’t the most technically accomplished flyer, but there was a lingering happiness to her every movement that was impossible to miss and that made her striking to watch.

“Free,” she said to him when they came to a stop on a high hill overlooking the twinkling lights of the city. “In the sky, I have always been free.”

Observing the naked pleasure on her face, Jason had to fight the urge to wrap her in his wings, hide her from the sight of those who would turn that joy to despair, using her love of the sky to torture her. “Be careful.”

Closing the small distance between them, Mahiya put a hand to his chest in a gentle feminine invitation he knew he had only to step back to reject. In spite of her vivid emotions, she wasn’t a woman who would pursue a man who made it clear he didn’t want her . . . or one who knew that in taking her, he might destroy the very brightness of spirit that caught him in delicate chains, agonizingly painful in their hope.

28

“I am,” she said, “always careful, but you . . . now I know why you are such a great spymaster.”

He didn’t understand her meaning, the warmth of her touch seeping through the thin black shirt he wore to linger on his skin. Drinking in the sensation, he ran his fingers down the line of her neck, hot satisfaction in his blood when she shivered. There was a deeper pleasure in this, in knowing what made her sigh, learning the intimacies of her body. Yet it was a pleasure he’d denied himself for hundreds of years.

“Jason?” Wounded eyes, blue and wet. “You’re leaving?”

“I told you I couldn’t stay.” Couldn’t give her his heart.

Fist clenching in the sheet she held to her breast, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I thought . . . when you kept returning . . .”

He’d been so young then, very good at his job, but far behind his peers when it came to emotions, to relationships. He’d thought that long-ago lover had understood he spoke the naked truth, never realizing the secret dreams brewing in her heart. A heart he’d broken without meaning to, without even knowing he held the power to do so. It had soon healed for she’d been young, too, and he thought that she might no longer even remember the black-winged angel she’d once pleaded with to stay with her.

But he’d never forgotten the lesson, and he wondered if Mahiya had truly heard what he’d said to her the night before or if she, too, harbored dreams of fixing the broken pieces of him. The truth was, no matter how she compelled him, she would soon realize what was shattered in him was nothing that could be healed, the damage done at such a young age that it had become part of his very psyche.

Yet instead of backing off, he did a selfish thing then. Lowering his head, he claimed the lush intoxication of her kiss, his hands thrusting into her hair to tumble black silk over his skin. She opened for him with a sweet sensual generosity that enticed without design, made him want to caress her every secret pleasure point until her desire was a shimmer across her skin and he knew her like no other man ever would.

“Jason? You’re leaving?”

Tugging back her head with the hand fisted in her hair, he forced himself to release lips swollen from his kisses. “Open your eyes.” It was a harsh order.

Thick lashes rose to reveal tawny eyes hazy with passion. “I see you, Jason.”

“And what do you see?” He stroked his free hand up her side, rubbed his thumb gently back and forth over her nipple through her clothing.

Her breath caught, but she didn’t break the eye contact. “A man who is a storm, who belongs to no one and who will never be tamed. To expect otherwise would be to ask for agonizing disappointment.”

Open eyes, he thought, she had wide-open eyes. “Some might say you’re attempting to seduce me in order to lead me on a leash.”

Laughter, warm and startled, spilled over the hilltop. “Only a fool would attempt to contain or direct a storm. I’m far too smart.”

He took her lips in an open-mouthed kiss in an attempt to drink of her laughter, steal some of her dazzling warmth of spirit to hoard inside him. Her nails dug into his chest through his shirt, her breast pushed into his hand, and her scent, it tangled around him in an exotic wildness.

The gut-deep sense of connection was an intense shock that made his nerve endings burn. He had never felt more real, more a part of the world.

Breaking the kiss only long enough that she could gasp in air, he slanted his mouth across hers again, licking and tasting and sinking into the carnal pleasure. Her nipple was a hard point beneath the fabric of her tunic, and when he squeezed it between forefinger and thumb, she jerked, pulling away from his touch.

Folding back wings that had become fully unfurled, he watched her attempt to resettle her breathing. “Not here,” she said at last, her chest rising and falling in an erratic rhythm. “Will you come to my bed?”

It was such a polite invitation, and yet her lips were wet from his kiss, her cheeks flushed with sexual need. “Yes.”

* * *

He’d said yes, but Jason left after escorting Mahiya back to the palace, having received a message on his phone he had to follow up on at once. Sensual frustration tearing through her veins, she decided to take care of a task of her own and headed to Vanhi’s apartments using busy internal passageways. If she was a target, it’d make it difficult for anyone to cut her from the herd.

Vanhi was reading when she arrived. Mahiya bent down to kiss her smiling cheek before taking a seat in one of the comfortable armchairs in the vampire’s living area. “I’m disturbing you.”

“You know you are always welcome.” Vanhi slid an intricate metal bookmark between the pages and put the book on the coffee table. “It worries me, Mahiya, the look I see in your eyes.”

“Vanhi—”

The vampire held up her hand. “I know you too well, my dear. I rocked you when you cried as a babe and when Arav shattered your heart as a young woman.” Sighing, she reached out to take one of Mahiya’s hands in her own, squeezed. “You’ve been waiting your whole life to love someone, my sweet girl. I don’t want you to squander the power of that beautiful heart on a man who will not value such a gift.”

“I understand him, Vanhi.” Never would she forget the terrible sorrow she’d tasted in his tale of Nene and her Yavi, until it hurt her to imagine the cause. “I’m not expecting anything but what he can give me.”

“You say that, but you’re deeply vulnerable to kindness, to any indication of care.”

The emotional blow stung. “You make me sound like an abused pet.”

Rising to her feet, Vanhi walked over to the dining area to pour two glasses of wine. “I do not begrudge you happiness.” Care in every syllable as she retook her seat, having handed Mahiya the second wineglass. “I just don’t want you hurt again.”

Mahiya gave the other woman a crooked smile. “If the hurt is an honest one, I will survive.” Perhaps she had spent her life waiting for someone to love, and Jason . . . he needed to be loved, as a wildflower needed sunlight.

Vanhi shook her head. “I bear fault in this—it is to my sorrow that I couldn’t be there for you, couldn’t give you the love every child should know.”

“You did all you could.” What Mahiya knew of kindness and affection came from Jessamy and Vanhi. “She is an archangel.” And your loyalty is first to her. It was a truth Mahiya had accepted long ago.

A bleak sadness in Vanhi’s expression. “Tell me why you come to me so late, Mahiya child.”

Setting aside her wineglass, Mahiya spoke of the teddy bear, and the vampire with hair of scarlet and skin of porcelain. Vanhi rubbed at the furrows that had formed between her eyebrows. “Oh, I know him.” A frustrated sound. “It’s flitting at the very corner of my eye, his name, but I cannot quite grasp it.”

“Sleep on it.” Exhilaration made Mahiya want to push, but Vanhi was thousands of years old, carried a million fragments of memory. “If it comes to you tomorrow morn, send me a message.”

Lines still marring her forehead, Vanhi gave a slow nod. “He was not important, I think. But always there, at the edges. That’s why he’s so hard to remember.” A rueful smile. “Truly, I am getting old. So many pieces of a lifetime—sometimes I think they are hidden in secret corners of my mind.”

“I only wish my memory were as good as yours.”

Vanhi’s smile faded. “I wish you could’ve known your mother, child.”

Mahiya’s spine went rigid. “She slept with a married man. A man who belonged to her sister.”

“Yes.” Vanhi gave a solemn nod. “They were ever in competition, Neha and Nivriti.” Drinking deep of her wine, the vampire held Mahiya’s gaze with eyes of vivid green. “It was Nivriti whom Eris first courted.”