Chapter Fifteen
The air in the room evaporated, but it was nothing like when Silas’s angel brethren had attacked me. This was something different. Something forbidden. A high-pitched ringing hung in its place.
After a pause, he fumbled through two words. “You’re drunk.”
But we both knew that wasn’t true. He’d seen to it that I was sober before tucking me in. The tension was a rubber band stretched so taut that a single movement would bring it to snap. One look. One breath. One word.
“I’m not,” was all I said.
He remained utterly motionless. I might have thought he’d become a statue had I not seen the way the tendon in his neck flexed as he swallowed.
I tried again. “Silas, we have something in common that no two people—sorry, no two anythings—get to share. We were born into a world we didn’t choose. We did everything right until we realized it wasn’t right anymore. We’re with each other at the end of the world.”
“But Hell—”
“Has always known where it stood. Caliban always knew where he stood. Then there’s us. We were bent by our environments until we snapped. You understand me in a way no one else does. And it fucking sucks. I hate you half of the time for it.”
His quiet chuckle was half humor, half nerves. He said, “That doesn’t mean you want me in your bed.”
I twisted the sheets between my fingers.
Azrames had taunted me not too long ago saying that if I wanted to fuck an angel, this would be the time.
Fauna had made her feelings on monogamy perfectly clear, including offering to share her man when I’d stood in his apartment.
Caliban had facilitated my lucrative career in sex work and had admitted, whether I liked it or not, that he’d taken no vow of celibacy apart from me.
He’d been through relationships with me, listened to my brokenhearted cries over others, and pinned me against windows the nights of my dates and fucked me properly after I’d come home with another lover’s sweat drying on my skin.
He’d said more than once that we were never bound for a monogamous white picket fence.
The verbal consent was there. My feelings, on the other hand…
The rational part of my brain argued that Caliban and I had never been exclusive. Not in this life or in the others.
A smaller, anxious voice told me that this was different.
Sleeping with an angel was not like taking a baseball player to bed or making a few thousand dollars off an entrepreneur.
Lying down with one of Heaven’s soldiers was not like my dalliances with mortal love.
The same anxious voice thought that even Azrames would be better suited for solving carnal needs in a pinch, were I to turn to immortal resources, as he had the sort of head on his shoulders that wouldn’t make things weird or swerve in on someone else’s territory.
And maybe that was why I wanted it to be Silas.
I wasn’t the catalyst for the end of the world because I cared about prophecy or principle.
I had chosen my role of my own accord. I’d spent my human life told what to do and who to be.
I’d endured countless cycles tossed and turned in the waves of prophecy as a pawn for other people to push about the board.
I wanted to choose things because I wanted them, despite what kingdoms and realms and the universe desired.
I didn’t want to belong to lore or divination or the Book of Revelation.
I was my own person. And Silas wasn’t in my prophecy.
He wasn’t in any of the cards or prompts or ulterior motives for my life.
He was just an angel who’d chosen me—not my soul, not my potential, not who the world hoped I might be—but me.
I could barely see the cut of his jaw against the dim hall light. His face was a mask of shadow, expressionless against the gloom. “I want you because I want you.”
It was the minute that lasted a century.
Every cell in my body hurt as the tension became a tangible pain.
I would have melted with anticipated rejection or anxiety or fear that I’d fucked up if it were anyone else, but this wasn’t anyone else.
This was Silas. This was an angel who understood my problems with Heaven so thoroughly that he’d saved me time and time again so that I could wage war against his master.
He’d sacrificed everything to keep me alive.
He’d betrayed his kingdom, his people, and he’d done it with no agenda.
Perhaps the world was burning, but he’d walk through fire for me.
A single step toward the bed took my breath away. He paused again, this time to see if my sharp inhale was one of regret, of jest, of anything other than what it was.
My heart was in my throat as I rested my hands on either side of me and slid backward on the bed. I looked up at where he stood, brows pinched in a hopeful question, and then came his answer.
A rush of spice filled the room as he joined me on the bed.
I wasn’t sure what I’d expected from an angel, but there was nothing tentative about the way he planted a hand against the small of my back and pulled me to him.
Glitter flared behind him where I knew his wings were as his golden halo eyes burned into mine.
My head spun as if drunk on myrrh as he brought his face near mine.
I thought he might kiss me, but instead, his lips brushed against my jaw as a low, masculine command filled my ear.
I tried to pull away to look at him, but his second hand had a firm hold on my jaw, my chin, my throat, holding my face in position as he said, “I’m going to have to hear you say exactly what you want, or I won’t believe it’s real. ”
I tried to shake my head, but he held it in place.
“No, there’s no worming out of this one.
Say: Silas, I want you to leave. Get off my bed and go to the guest room.
I’ll close the door behind me, and we can pretend this never happened.
But if you want me to stay…if this is real…
you’ll have to say so. Tell me: Silas, I want you to take off my clothes, to taste me, to feel you inside of me. ”
I was going to pass out. I struggled to fight off the question. “Can angels have sex with humans?”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed,” came his answering growl, “but I’m not a very good angel.”
I wormed again. I wasn’t questioning my choice, but god if he wasn’t making me fight for it, and in this moment, I was an absolute coward. “Silas…”
He softened his hold to pull away and watch my expression.
Despite the black-and-white dominance of his command, his gilded eyes told a different story.
There was thirst in them, yes, but there was also hope.
I held his gaze for as long as I could until the hope became an unspoken plea—one that he wouldn’t let bleed into his expression, but one that sang from the deepest parts of him.
“I want you to stay,” I said. “I want…”
His fingers flexed against my back as he went stiff. He didn’t breathe.
I scrunched my eyes closed against the pain of vulnerability as I admitted my truth. “I’m no angel, either. You know who and what I am.” I opened my eyes and met his as I said, “I want you to take off my—”
Apparently, that was enough.
He was out of the pale fighting leathers in an instant.
I didn’t have time to marvel at how different he looked without the battle attire before my arms were over my head, allowing him to take off my shirt in one deft motion.
He moved over me, sending me to my back.
His hand caught my head the moment before it bounced against the mattress.
He slipped his hand from the back of my head to the back of my neck, forcing me to tilt my chin toward the ceiling as he dragged burning kisses over my throat, along my jaw, stopping just shy of my mouth.
I inhaled him by the bucketful. Goose bumps ran over my entire body as frankincense and gold filled my lungs, my blood, my innermost being.
I wanted his tongue on mine. I arched for him to kiss me, but he slipped past my lips to leave a fiery trail of kisses down my collarbone, following my sternum, my belly, pausing just above the hem of my sweatpants.
I lifted my hips as he settled back onto his knees to drag my pants off my waist, over my ass, down my thighs with aching slowness.
They landed somewhere in the shadowy puddles of my bedroom with a soft sound as his mouth found my knee.
My toes curled against the vibrations of his low groan of desire as warm air, soft lips, and gentle kisses crept from my knee to my inner thigh.
The forbidden rebellion of corrupting an angel tantalized and healed me all at once.
I stared my churchgoing childhood in the eye and flipped it the middle finger as desire slicked between my legs.
I was naked before an agent of Heaven, and I was not afraid.
I’d never felt more empowered than I did bare beneath the enemy.
I was the motherfucking antichrist.
Silas’s pause was so complete that I almost panicked over whether he could hear my thoughts. I hadn’t realized I was panting in anticipation before he pulled himself up to look me in the eye once more.
“It’s not too late,” he said. “I want this, but if you’re having second thoughts—”
“Touch me,” I breathed.
“If you have even a single doubt—”
I grabbed him by the back of his head and yanked him to me.
I kissed him as hard as I could, desperate for him to understand how healing this was for me.
This was more than carnal want. This was better than friends with benefits, than one-night stands, than wasted years in club bathrooms and dating apps and short-lived human connections.
This was taking back my power from the years I’d been threatened and tormented with verses and prayers and punishments.
I needed this every bit as much as he wanted it.
He returned the kiss immediately, leaving me humming with his taste.
The kiss broke only so he could look into my eyes and watch my face as his tip teased my entrance. I tightened my hold on the back of his neck and gave the barest of nods before my sharp gasp was the only noise in the room.
I melted into his involuntary moan. I wrapped my legs around him to take every last inch. I bit down on the pulsing muscle that ran between his neck and shoulder, sinking my teeth into it as I groaned.
He held me against him as he flipped us, leaving me on top as the aggressor, me to set the pace, me to move my hips to say with every thrust: I want this, I want this, I want this.
The corner of my eye caught its effects before I was able to marvel it fully: He’d turned my skin into shimmering gold dust, as if his glitter was inside me.
Time was a pad of butter over hot bread as it soaked into the night, drenching us both in sweat and desire and spice.
The glitter spread, every inch of me glowing in a very literal way as we shone, fused together by crushed gems and sunlight.
He was relentless, thick, and rough. I held on for dear life, clawing, biting, struggling to keep hold as though I were riding a magnificent, glistening bull.
He sat up with me, our legs folded over one another.
“Move closer to the wall so I have something to hold on to,” I said.
“Hold on to me,” he replied.
He clutched me to his chest for dear life as we moved.
I kept my legs wrapped around him as he took me to the brink and pushed me over.
I knew from the hot pulse, the shared gasps and breaths and cries, the sticky wetness oozing from within me, and from the flooding scent of thieves’ oil that I wasn’t the only one who’d finished.
I didn’t see God when I came.
I saw an angel.