“So, when I’m an angel, will I get such an awesome place?” I asked.

“I’m sure it will be much better.”

I jumped at the brush of his words against my ear, so close that each syllable caressed my skin. I hadn’t heard him approach. Those angels were way too quiet. We stared at each other for a few moments, the angel and I. The silence was positively deafening. I wished I knew what he was thinking.

“How did it go with Harker?” I asked him, just to break the silence.

“I brought him to the High Angels. What they do with him remains to be seen.”

The silence returned with a vengeance, stretching on to eternity.

“Your plan is insane,” he finally said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. What made you think you could simply join the Legion of Angels and jump up to the ninth level just like that?”

“Dogged determination,” I told him with a smile.

The angel remained unimpressed.

“Ok, I didn’t think it would be just like that,” I said. “I knew it would be difficult.”

“What you’ve faced so far is nothing compared to what is to come, to the horrors you will face. You will be tested in ways you cannot begin to imagine.”

“If you’re trying to scare me—”

“I’m trying to help you,” he told me.

I thought about that for a moment, and it just didn’t make sense. “Why?”

“Because Harker was right about one thing. You are different. There’s something about you.” He stared me straight in the eye and didn’t even blink. “You will have an important role to play in this world, Leda Pierce. I can feel it.”

I shrugged. “I’m just a girl from Purgatory.”

“Not anymore,” he told me, his hand brushing across my jaw. “Now, you are a soldier in the Legion of Angels. And you will make it to the ninth level. I will make sure of it. This I promise you.”

“Nero…I don’t know what to say. Thank you.”

“You can thank me by letting me help you, instead of going off after vampires and gods know what else and trying to do it all by yourself, thinking that will protect everyone else. Promise me now that you won’t do that again. You nearly died, Leda.”

“I didn’t know you cared,” I said with a coy smile.

“I will train you,” he said, immune to my charms. Or maybe I wasn’t nearly as charming as I thought I was. “I will help you get through the levels.”

No one had ever made it through the levels of the Legion faster than Nero. I couldn’t have asked for a better coach.

“I will be tough on you,” he warned me.

“Oh, I never would have guessed. You’ve been so easy on me up to this point.” I smirked at him.

“You might hate me by the end of it.”

“I can live with that.”

He snorted. “There’s one more thing. Something we can try if you wish.”

His gaze dipped to my lips briefly before it jerked back up to my eyes. I was suddenly and totally aware of how close he was standing to me. I didn’t answer him, uncertain if this was his way of propositioning me. And what I would say if he was.

“I can help you see your brother,” he told me. Whatever next words I’d expected, those weren’t it.

“What?”

“Just for a second,” he clarified. “I can connect to him.”

“But I thought that the better you know someone, the more easily you can link to them. You don’t know my brother at all.”

“No, but I do know you. I can use your connection to your brother to find him.” He paused. “If we exchange blood.”

The last time I’d drunk his blood, I had been so crazed with lust than I’d nearly jumped him in the club’s hallway. I hadn’t been able to think straight. All I’d wanted was him. Things had been hardly better when he’d drunk from me. Whatever was between us, if I gave into it, it was going to drive me mad. But if it would help me figure out where Zane was, it was worth the risk.

“Let’s do it,” I told him.

Nero pulled the curtains closed and dimmed the lights in his apartment. Then he pulled fifty candles out of a gigantic box and set them up all around the living room. They looked pretty and smelled better: like vanilla and strawberries and peaches. Nero waved his hand, and the flames flickered to life on all the candles at once.

He extended his hand to me, motioning me forward. Swallowing my doubt, burying it beneath a mountain of resolve, I walked up to him and took his hand. He took my other hand too, his hold firm but not rough. Slow and smooth, he lowered into his knees, and I followed the motion of his body, lowering with him.

He met my eyes. “Are you ready?”

I nodded.

He released one of my hands and drew the knife strapped to his thigh. He pricked his finger with the tip. As blood beaded on the surface of his skin, heat flooded me, a wave of fire washing from my head to my tiptoes. My mouth ached—no, my whole body ached. Ached for his blood. For him. I felt my fangs descending, searing my gums with savage need.

“Sorry,” I said, pressing my lips together. My back arched forward, pushing out my breasts. My hips rocked toward him, opening. I realized what I was doing and pulled back. “Sorry.”

He caught my retreating hand. “Don’t be sorry.”

“I have to learn to control this.”