He lifted his hand to run his fingers along the fine line of her jaw.

39

A cough from the doorway had him turning to face Kiama. Hands held crisply behind her back, she was looking anywhere but at the two of them as she said, “Sire, if you don’t need me, I’ll leave to take up my duties at the garrison—one of my people just went down with a wing injury.”

“Reborn?”

She nodded. “He spotted a lone one crawling away into the shadows of a tree, dropped to take it out—but a second one jumped out at him from a hiding spot. He wasn’t scratched or bitten, but his wing muscles need a day to heal.”

Titus nodded his permission to her request and told her to take along the angel who stood guard in the courtyard. He was here to watch over Sharine now. After Kiama’s departure, he turned to find Sharine looking down at the book again. Her long tail of hair had slipped to one side to reveal the slender line of her neck and the gentle slope of her shoulders.

No one looking at her would believe that she was made of titanium and had a temper hot enough to set the sky aflame. And still he tempted that temper by bending to press a kiss to the spot where her neck flowed into her back.

She shivered. “Titus.” No anger after all, and her eyes held an otherworldly glow when their gazes met.

Outside of a Cascade, only one thing was supposed to glow among angelkind—an archangel’s wings when he was about to release his deadly power. Yet her eyes held a light that wasn’t from the sun. He accepted that. She was Sharine, and Sharine made her own rules.

Today, she rose on her toes and he bent, and they met in between in a kiss that had him groaning, his hands gripping her hips. When he lifted her up, she wrapped her arms around his neck and met him lick for lick, taste for taste, her chest pressed to the damp plane of his. Heart booming and air no longer necessary, he crushed her close and kissed her like a man starving.

Her breasts were the perfect size for her body and they had nipples that pressed at him through her tunic until he wanted to tear off the tunic and suck hard, make them wet and slick. Shifting his hands to her lower curves, he bounced her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist.

Groaning, he turned to sit her down on the desk . . . and reality hit.

“Not here,” he said, breaking the kiss, his breath rough and his chest rising and falling in a ragged rhythm. “Not in the home of my enemy.”

Sharine ran her hand over his jaw, the touch unexpectedly tender. “Agreed,” she said, then leaned in to kiss him one more time.

He didn’t want to release her when she began to unfold her legs, but he forced his grip to ease, though he kept his hands on her so she slid down his body. A smile was his reward, and he was gratified to see that her breathing was as jagged as his. Damp patches marred the light purple of her tunic.

“You make me feel young and reckless, Titus,” she said, and touched her lips to his chest before pulling away.

The spot where she’d kissed, it ached deep inside.

His response flat-out terrified him and he was man enough to admit it.

“What have you found?” he asked, his voice coming out rough with the weight of the emotions he didn’t want to feel.

“Let me read out Charisemnon’s own words—you tell me what you think it says.” She held up her hand when he would’ve spoken, his eyebrows lowered. “Stop glowering—I’m not testing you in some fashion.” Razored words that should’ve killed his arousal dead.

His cock hardened even further; clearly his body wasn’t interested in being rational. “Then what’s this about?”

Lips plump and pink from the passion of their kiss, she said, “I’m simply unsure if my emotions toward what Charisemnon did have colored my interpretation.”

“If you searched the world for the least objective person on the subject of Charisemnon, you’d find me,” Titus pointed out, hands on his hips. “He is lower than a cockroach in my estimation. At least a cockroach knows no better.”

“Just try,” she said on a huff of breath. “You’re a highly intelligent man. Think with the strategic part of your brain that you utilize in the battlefield.”

Preening a little—though he wasn’t about to show it—he folded his arms and jerked up his chin. “Read, then, and I’ll see what I hear.”

Her reading voice was lyrical and lovely and he had to fight to pay attention to her words.

“‘I am racing to a great success in building a masterwork out of Lijuan’s gift and my own,’” she read, “‘such success as has not been seen among my kind for eons upon eons. Lijuan says that she has reason to believe there was another as great as me at the dawn of our existence, that she has scrolls in her keeping that hint at the reason behind vampires and why the toxin lives in us. If she is right, that first architect of disease was indeed terrible and strong.’”

Moving around the room because standing still wasn’t his natural state, Titus snorted. “Of course he worships the worst of us.”

Ignoring his interruption, Sharine carried on. “‘But I will be better than that unknown angel. They are forgotten. No one will forget me for I will do the one thing he could not. He infected angels, but he wasn’t in control. I will be in control. I will decide who lives and who dies. My legacy will be of power so deadly that no one will stand against me. Not even Lijuan. Should she try, well, I have my weapons.’”

Throwing back his head, Titus laughed long and hard, his amusement profoundly real. “There is never any honor among evildoers. They would’ve eaten each other had they survived the war.” The image gave him great pleasure. “Is there more? Or has he finished patting himself on the back?”

“There’s more, but what do you hear in that part?” Closing the book, Sharine turned so that she was looking at him as he walked along the other side of the room. Her wings were brilliant splashes of color in this otherwise staid space, as if a butterfly had flown in from the outside.

“If the story the Legion told Raphael is true, then the archangel who created the toxin infected us all.” An act so terrible that it existed in their cells to this day. “So what could Charisemnon do that the other hadn’t already done?”

Sharine didn’t interrupt, letting him pace as he worked the options through in his mind. There was only one answer. “He’s talking about being able to infect and save people at will.” Blood hot, he met Sharine’s gaze. “The ass is talking about an antidote.”

“Yes, I had the same thought.” Putting the journal on the desk, she picked up another one bound in identical leather. “This is the previous journal. I decided to read it after completing the most recent one—I had a feeling he’d been planning this for far longer than we realized, perhaps far longer than even Lijuan was aware.”

“I’ve long thought that he must’ve had a backup plan that included a place to hole up and recover should the battle be going against him.” But Titus hadn’t given him that opportunity. “You think he’s hidden the antidote in his secret place?”

“Nothing I’ve read says he had the antidote, only that it was in progress.” She flipped to a section in the journal. “But here, look.”

She walked to him again, and in her excitement, didn’t stop fast enough. Their wings overlapped once more, her arm brushing his chest as she held out the journal. An odd feeling bloomed inside him at the realization that she was comfortable enough with him to stand so close to him.

A kiss in passion was one thing, an act done while they were both fully rational quite another. Because when it came down to it, he was an archangel and there was nothing she could do should he decide to harm her.

“There, do you see?”

Jerking his gaze to what she was indicating on the page, he went to remind her he couldn’t fluently read Charisemnon’s native tongue. But it wasn’t words this time. It was a diagram. A location. But the map had been sketched without markers or compass headings, done by someone who knew the location and thus had no need of such instructions.

Taking the journal from her, he ran a finger over the slope that had been sketched across two pages. Stars dotted the sky, but those stars didn’t appear to be in any kind of real-world order. A river or a stream ran in the distance before disappearing without warning—either it went underground at that point, or Charisemnon hadn’t bothered to fully sketch it because it was of no interest to him.

What was most curious, however, was that within the hill was a residence. Charisemnon had drawn it like a dollhouse, with the front removed.

Either this was just an abandoned plan, or he’d built an entire stronghold under a mountain.

Right under Titus’s nose.

He rubbed his jaw. “I must speak to my spymaster. Let me see if she’s within reach.”

Sire, came the immediate response, I’m at the garrison. I came to speak to Tarik before I begin my sleep period.

Join us in the inner courtyard, Titus said. You can return to your foster brother soon. The two orphaned warriors had grown up together in Titus’s court and their bond was as tight today as the day they’d been born.

Turning to look down at Sharine’s uptilted face, he wanted to rub his thumb over her lips, steal another moment that had nothing to do with reborn or death. Curling his fingers into his palm instead, he told her what was happening. Sharine kept the relevant journal in hand as the two of them walked down to the inner courtyard.

“This place should be protected,” she said. “I know what you think of Charisemnon, but this repository of knowledge will be worth a great deal to our people.”

“Who knows what poison he dripped on those pages,” Titus muttered, “but I bow to your greater knowledge of such things.” He wasn’t so vengeful toward Charisemnon that he’d deprive angelkind of its rightful history. “I’ll tell our historians and librarians of its existence after things aren’t so dangerous. Else they might attempt to fly here now and I don’t need noncombatants taking up time or resources.”