Before, when all signs had seemed to point to Neha, that oversight hadn’t mattered. Now . . . “I need them to retrieve another body,” he said, making the decision to risk trusting the other man, “and I need everyone to stay silent on it.”

Rhys’s eyes darkened. “My lady—”

“Cannot know.” Jason told Rhys what he suspected about the woman whose crumpled body had lain exposed to the elements for far too long.

Rhys thrust a shaking hand through his hair. “The fools!” It was a judgment spit out in a low tone that wouldn’t reach beyond Jason. “Audrey was a woman of little wit, but to attempt to make a laughingstock of an archangel? Had she found out, Neha would have—” He bit off his words, suddenly the grim-faced general whose loyalty was to Neha.

“This”—Jason nodded at Arav’s body—“changes things. I do not believe her involved in any of the murders.”

A shuddering exhalation that sounded like relief. Jason didn’t understand the reaction, not when Neha was an archangel, violence part of her nature, until Rhys said, “No matter her rage, if she had murdered Eris, it would’ve eventually driven her mad. My lady loved true.”

Jason had seen the madness of love firsthand, scrubbed its rust red imprint from the walls, smelled the smoky remnants of the inferno, knew the damage it could do. It was the most dangerous, most destructive emotion of them all.

“The world,” Rhys added, “cannot afford a second insane archangel.”

Lijuan, Jason completed silently, was more than enough.

* * *

Having left her watch over the body once Jason arrived, Mahiya returned to her rooms, her skin sticky with the scent of death. It took twenty minutes under the pulsing spray of near-scalding water before she finally felt clean. Dressed in a simple black tunic with tapered pants of a deep blue that echoed part of her wings, she dried and loosely pinned up her hair before going out onto the balcony.

It was impossible to think about anything other than the carnage that had turned the fort into an abattoir, images of Shabnam’s violated flesh and Arav’s crushed and savaged body burned onto her irises. Without the evidence of what remained of Arav’s wings, as well as the heavy ring that had survived on a miraculously unshattered finger, she’d never have known it was him.

A quiet footfall.

Leaning over, she saw a servant passing along the softly lit pathway below, called out for him to halt. When she went down to join him, asking whether the servants had heard anything regarding Arav, his face closed up, his expression formal. “It was with great sorrow that we learned of General Arav’s death.”

“No one will punish you for speaking ill of him,” she said, “least of all I.” Everyone knew of her humiliation—she’d worn her heart on her sleeve during her involvement with Arav. “The lady’s fort is being painted bloodred and she wants answers.” Mahiya didn’t mourn Eris or Arav, and Audrey had made her own bed, but Shabnam had been an innocent. “Did Arav cause insult?”

It was clear the servant was torn between obeying the dictates of the archangel who was his liege and self-protective distance. The former won. “He was heard speaking to one who is loyal to Rhys, offering the man a position he did not yet have the ability to provide on the condition the other switch loyalties.”

“When I am consort . . .”

“How was he overheard?” Arav wouldn’t have broached the subject of such treachery in public.

Lashes coming down, head bowed, the servant backed away into the dark. At first, she thought he was refusing to answer, then she realized it was his answer. No, Arav hadn’t been stupid, but he’d been arrogant, an angel of nine hundred who considered weaker beings beneath his notice. “I see,” she said as the servant reappeared from the shadows. “Was Rhys aware of Arav’s attempts to subvert his people?”

Another falling of shutters. “I do not know.”

Yes, Rhys knew. He knows everything that happens in this fort.

“But,” she said to Jason when he returned much later, “Rhys has always been far more elegant in eliminating his enemies.” Stepping out onto her half of the balcony where Jason waited, she handed him the cognac she’d poured from the bottle kept for guests.

“I think I’m beyond tea tonight.”

The words had felt inexplicably intimate.

“I eliminated Rhys as a suspect before I knew this piece of information, but even with it, I still do not believe him to be the killer.” He sipped at the dark amber liquid, his throat muscles working. “The way Shabnam was exposed—Rhys, I think, is not capable of such a thing.”

“Yes. He’d never treat a woman with such disrespect, even in death.”

Taking another sip, Jason reached back to put the glass on the window ledge behind them, before turning to lean his bare forearms on the balcony railing. He’d showered and changed, too, wore a plain black T-shirt and jeans, his feet bare. Behind him, his wings fell gracefully to the floor, shadows kin to the night. She’d never seen him this . . . relaxed, as if he’d taken off part of his armor.

Her eyes went to the tie at his nape, the brown skin beneath colorless in the night, and she remembered the brush of his thumb across her lower lip.

“I think, you must decide something tonight.”

Her womb clenched. She hadn’t trusted her body to a man in an eternity, and Jason . . . he had never lied to her.

“May I undo the tie on your hair?”

He went motionless at her soft request, until he could have been the most beautiful gargoyle ever created, his wings of jet. Heart thudding in her throat, she waited . . . until at last he inclined his head in a small nod.

Her fingers trembled as she reached out. Taking care not to touch his nape, not to assume a deeper intimacy, she undid the tie and slid it away. A silken black waterfall spilled across his shoulders, the strands cool but no longer damp, the night air just warm enough to have sucked the moisture away. Unable to resist, she ran her fingertips lightly over the strands before dropping her hand to her side.

“How far would you go?”

Startled at the murmured question, she jumped. “What?”

“As you said, I am your only way out—so, how far would you go?”

Her skin flushed hot then cold. “I was baiting you,” she admitted. “Even to attain my freedom, I would never barter away the one thing that has always been mine.” Her body, her desire.

“Good. You’ve made your decision?”

“Yes.” Breath tight in her chest, she raised her hand, hesitated.

“Touch me, Mahiya.”

It was all she needed. Giving in to the need, she ran her fingers through his hair. It felt akin to petting a tiger that had, for quixotic reasons of his own, decided not to bite her hand off. She made no mistake that this showed a crack in the obsidian shields around Jason’s heart, indulged in no daydreams of a deeper relationship.

Still . . . it felt good to be close to a man who had never once treated her as disposable. Even at the very start, he’d given her a formal kind of respect. Now, she saw true respect in those eyes of dark, luxuriant brown. It saddened her deep within that the fragile bond between them would break when this task was done.

Jason, she knew without asking, wasn’t a man who allowed anyone as close as a familiar lover would become. Her chest ached at the knowledge of the hurt that must have shaped him to such endless aloneness, but she also knew she must be so, so careful not to fall for him, not to seek more than the dark sexuality that swirled between them, hot and beautifully violent as a desert storm.

* * *

Jason knew he was walking a dangerous edge with Mahiya, but he also knew he craved her touch too much to turn back. Clenching his jaw to control his shudder as her fingers touched his scalp, stroked down, he forced himself to remain motionless when all he wanted to do was turn, pin her to the wall, and thrust into the lush heat of her body.

He heard the bones in his jaw grind against one another as she stroked again, and suddenly, her touch was gone. “I’m distressing you. I’m sorry.” An edge of horror in her tone. “I would’ve never—”

Pushing off the railing, he halted her apology by the simple expedient of taking her delicately lovely face in his hands. “Stop.”

Her breath rasped in her throat as she sucked in air, her eyes huge. But instead of flinching at the rough speed of his touch or pushing him away, she fisted one hand in the soft cotton of his T-shirt . . . and rose up on tiptoe.

It took every ounce of control he had not to accept the silent invitation at once. “You must understand,” he said, and his voice was a harsh scrape, “this won’t make me stay with you, won’t make me commit. I don’t have that ability.” To bond, to open his heart, to trust that the one he gave it to wouldn’t savage it.

Mahiya’s breath whispered over his lips as she maintained her position. “I know.” Soft words. “I also know that I’d like to share myself with a strong man who doesn’t court me with lies, is honest in his desire.”

He saw her swallow, knew she wasn’t as confident as she was attempting to appear. “Be certain. You’ll never be able to take this back.” And he would not taint an innocent with his darkness, would not turn her bitter because of the lack in him.

Her lips brushed his.

Thrusting both hands into her hair, the strands beginning to unravel, he slanted his mouth over her own, intent on devouring . . . when he felt her spine go taut.

Slow Jason. Slow. She is not a bedmate who is accustomed to seeking pleasure.

It took gut-deep self-control, but he gentled the kiss, suckling her upper lip into his mouth and releasing it, only to court her with sipping kisses that enticed rather than demanded.

Her fingers flexed on his waist, her muscles losing their tautness. Having gone down flat on her feet, she now rose up toward him again, her wings beginning to open. Coaxing her with another petting kiss, he nudged her into her living room, the area lit only by the glow from a single table lamp. He’d used his abilities to cloak them from curious eyes thus far, but the ability required focus, and all of his was now on Mahiya.

Breaking the kiss once they were inside, he murmured, “The front door.”

Pulse a stutter in her throat, she gave a jerky nod and walked to lock the doors into her suite as he shut and locked the ones to the balcony. “I’ve—” Her words ended in a gasp, his chest pressed to her back, his head bent over the curve of her neck.

22

Placing his hands on her hips, he held her in position as he tasted her skin, as he drowned in the sense of connection, of being real, if only for the fleeting slice of night he’d spend with the woman in his arms. Her scent, that wild spice, it made him drunk, her skin so soft and warm, her body all graceful curves. He wished she wore a sari so he’d have only to stroke up his hands to caress the naked skin of her waist.

Her wings, trapped between them, shifted in tiny, restless movements as he reached up to remove the remainder of the pins she’d used to hold her hair in place. It tumbled over his hands in a cascade of unexpected curls, lush and thick and satiny soft. Fisting one hand in the strands, he tugged back her head, arching her neck for his mouth.