“Reyes,” I said weakly, already losing consciousness, the pressure around my throat so precise, so exact. I could no longer see his face, just blackness, the undulating robe that was so much a part of him protecting his identity even from me. The world blurred then spun. I fought his hold, his grip like a metal brace, and as much as I wanted to believe I fought the good fight, I felt my limbs going limp almost immediately, too weak to hold their own weight.

I felt him press against me as a total eclipse crept in. I heard him speak, his voice winding around me like smoke. “Beware the wounded animal.”

Then he was gone and gravity took hold and I collapsed onto the shower floor once again, this time face-first, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it was going to suck.

* * *

The strangest thing happened on the day I was born. A dark figure was waiting for me just outside my mother’s womb. He wore a hooded cloak. It undulated around him, filling the entire delivery room with rolling black waves, like smoke in a soft breeze. Though I couldn’t see his face, I knew he was watching when the doctor cut the cord. Though I couldn’t feel his fingers, I knew he touched me when the nurses cleaned my skin. Though I couldn’t hear his voice, I knew he whispered my name, the sound deep and husky.

He was so powerful, his mere presence weakened me, made air difficult to draw into my lungs, and I was afraid of him. As I grew older, I realized he was the only thing I was afraid of. I’d never been plagued with the normal phobias of childhood, probably a good thing, since dead people gathered around me en masse. But him, I was afraid of. And yet he showed himself only in times of dire need. He’d saved me, saved my life more than once. So why was I afraid? Why had I dubbed him the Big Bad growing up when he seemed anything but?

Perhaps it was the power that radiated off him, that seemed to absorb a part of me when he was near.

Jump ahead fifteen years to a frigid night on the streets of Albuquerque, the first time I’d seen Reyes Farrow. My older sister, Gemma, and I had been on recon for a school project in a rather bad part of town when we noticed movement in the window of a small apartment. We realized in horror that a man was beating a teenaged boy. At that moment, my only thought was to save him. Some way. Somehow. Out of desperation, I threw a brick through the man’s window. It worked. He stopped hitting the boy. Unfortunately, he came after us. We tore down a dark alley and were searching for an opening along a fence when we realized the boy had escaped as well. We saw him doubled over behind the apartment building.

We went back. Blood streaked down his face, dripped from his incredible mouth. We found out his name was Reyes and tried to help, but he refused our offer, even going so far as to threaten us if we didn’t leave. That was my first lesson in the absurdities of the male mind. But because of that incident, I wasn’t completely surprised when I found out more than a decade later that Reyes had spent the last ten years in prison for killing that very man.

That was only one of several truths I’d recently found out about him, not the least of which was the fact that Reyes and the Big Bad, the dark being that had been following me, watching over me since the day of my birth, were one and the same. He had been the thing that saved my life over and over. The thing that studied me from the shadows, a mere shadow himself, and protected me from afar. The thing I was most afraid of growing up. Hell, the only thing I was afraid of growing up.

It was mind numbing to realize the smoky being from my childhood was a man made of flesh and blood. Yet he could leave his physical body and travel through space and time as an incorporeal presence, one that could dematerialize in the span of a heartbeat. One that could draw a sword and sever a man’s spinal column within the blink of an eye. One that could melt the polar ice caps with a single glance from underneath his dark lashes.

And yet every revelation brought more questions. Only a week ago, I found out where his supernatural abilities stemmed from. I saw into his world when his fingertips brushed down my arm, when his mouth scorched flames over my skin, and when he sank inside me, causing the surge of orgasm to unlock his past and pull back the curtains for me to see. I watched the birth of the universe unfold before my eyes as his father—his real father, the most beautiful angel ever created—was thrown from the halls of heaven. Lucifer fought back, his army vast, and in this time of great turmoil, Reyes was born. Forged from the heat of a supernova, he rose quickly through the ranks to become a respected leader. Second only to his father, he commanded millions of soldiers, a general among thieves, even more beautiful and powerful than his father, with the key to the gates of hell scored into his body.

But his father’s pride would not be subdued. He wanted the heavens. He wanted complete control over every living thing in the universe. He wanted God’s throne.

Reyes followed his father’s every command, waited and watched for a portal to be born upon the Earth, a direct passage to heaven, a way out of hell. A tracker of flawless stealth and skill, he negotiated his way through the gates of the underworld and found the portals in the farthest reaches of the universe, a thousand lights identical in shape and form. A thousand reapers hoping for the privilege to serve on Earth.

But Reyes looked harder and saw one made of spun gold, a daughter of the sun, shimmering and glistening. Me. I turned and saw him and smiled. And Reyes was lost.

He defied his father’s wishes for him to return to hell with our location, waited centuries for me to be sent, and was born upon the Earth himself, forsaking all that he knew for me. Because the day he was born in human form was the day he forgot who he was, what he was. And more important, what he was capable of. He gave up everything to be with me, but a cruel twist in fate sent him into the arms of a monster, and Reyes grew up with his every move dictated by a predator of the worst kind. Slowly, he began to remember his past. Who he was. What he was. But by that time, he’d been sent to prison for killing the man who raised him.