Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“I am heartened.” A joking comment, but a truth, too—because all those she’d named, and so many others, would call him to account, and would back his consort should it come to it.
He kissed her fingers as he spread his hands over the hard mound of her belly. “Hello, little one. We’re excited to meet you.”
Smiling, Elena placed her hands over his. “I dream of the baby sometimes,” she said. “I like to think our child is dreaming in there and I’m catching bits of it.”
“What does this bright spark dream?”
“Warmth and pieces of color and a glow that feels like happiness.” Her hands tightened on his. “We’ll be good parents.” A firm statement. “Izar told me that. He pointed out that we kept all three of them alive while they were with us and we’re only having a single cub, so it should be a piece of cake by comparison.”
Raphael’s shoulders shook. “Blunt but correct.” Except that their child, while not half-chimera, was to be born of an archangelic parent, and a woman who was an angel-Made. Mortal or immortal, that child would not be like any other in this world. “Did you point out that you’re a one-being just like Naasir?”
“Hah! No. I’m going to tomorrow—I can’t wait for the discussion we’ll have.”
“Look, hbeebti. A shooting star.” It arced across the midnight sky dotted with diamonds, a line of stardust in its wake.
“Quick, make a wish!”
Raphael already had. Please, keep my Elena and our child safe. Nothing and no one was more important to him than the woman in his arms, and the child they’d created between them.
* * *
* * *
It was sometime in the middle of the next night that they received news about Hannah.
Elena was padding about in sweats in the kitchen, eating pickles that she was dipping into peanut butter—while a shirtless Raphael sat at the heavy wooden counter that ran half the length of the massive space, watching her with a kind of affectionate fascination.
She offered him a pickle, shrugged when he demurred. “Your loss.”
Finishing her current pickle, she went to the cupboard where the staff stocked things that they had shipped in from outside the Refuge—like the peanut butter, which none of them could understand. “Aha!”
There it was, the thin rectangle of orange-infused ninety-five percent dark chocolate that was her archangel’s secret vice.
Shifting on her heel, she shook it at him.
His grin turned him from handsome to devastating. “How did you sneak that in there?”
Tapping the side of her nose, she said, “I know people.” She handed it over to him.
After opening it, he bit straight into the bar as he always did.
“So uncivilized,” she muttered, while dipping a pickle into peanut butter.
“Come over here and say that,” he challenged, and they both grinned like kids up to no good as Elena went around to sit next to him, their wings overlapping and their thighs touching.
“You know,” she said, after swallowing a pickle–peanut butter bite, “when I first saw this kitchen all those years ago, it seemed this huge edifice of a thing. Not a home kitchen, you know? Not a place where I might one day have midnight snacks, or scrounge around for a piece of toast because that’s all I wanted.”
Her archangel reached over to grab the bottle of cold milk she’d forgotten and put it beside her. “I suppose it is a touch overwhelming.” He glanced up at beams that crisscrossed the cavernous ceiling, took in the stone walls. “I’ve never really thought about it—I spent my childhood in kitchens just like this.”
“Did you get underfoot?” Elena’s eyes almost glowed in the dark as they did at times when the wildfire was surging inside her.
Flames—white gold electric with blue, their edges an iridescent midnight and dawn—flickered over her wings just then, the wildfire lovely and not at all dangerous to her.
“All the time,” he said as he ate more of the chocolate that his consort had first introduced him to five decades earlier—and that she plied him with at odd moments that made him soften inside in a way that was only ever for her.
Of all the people he’d known in his adult life, Elena was the only one who wanted to look after him even when he was in the peak of health and power. That she loved him with the passionate fury of her deadly hunter’s heart was the grounding truth of his existence.
“I got swatted on the butt by kitchen towels more than once,” he told her, grinning as he remembered how he’d scampered through the kitchen, wriggling this way and that to escape the towel threats. “They had no fear of my parents’ wrath, those staff members, because Caliane and Nadiel both expected them to treat me the same as any other child.”
His parents might’ve disagreed on some parts of the raising of him—Nadiel had definitely been the less strict parent—but on this they’d been united. One court or another, he was treated as a child.