Chapter 11
I t was an unnerving feeling to have your voice be the sole thing to fill the silence one moment and, the next moment, have it choked off by the elements around you. Thick, heavy snow bounded down on Neela’s shoulders and head, but it was nothing compared to the weight of Rhode’s body as he threw her to the ground. Uncoordinated hands grasped for each other, but only his succeeded in finding their mark. Flat on her back, head pounding and eyes blinking overtime to shake the snow from her vision, she could see the enormous iced-over tree branch hurtling toward them.
“Rhode! Move!” Neela tried to squirm her way out from under him, but the bastard likely weighed more than the maple she’d been marveling over earlier.
The angel gritted his teeth, then a sharp slice ripped through the chilly air. Wings. Two gleaming pale silver wings shot from his back, and terror gripped her heart at what he was intending to do.
She’d seen those wings before and, amid the tossing and turning that plagued her last night, put the pieces together of what exactly they were made of, what she knew Cyro had done to him—and how truly brittle his metal could be.
“No!”
The impact scattered every remaining raptor in the trees and smashed Rhode’s forehead into the ground next to her ear. His grunts and strangled breaths provided the soundtrack for the snow cascading around them. Then the cage of Rhode’s arms extended, cowered, then extended again as he struggled to support the huge branch flattening the two of them into the packed snow.
Bruising pain assaulted her as her limbs mingled with Rhode’s, pressing into each other at sharp angles. Owing to the meager padding of her winter coat, her back had been somewhat spared the worst of the impact, but that meant nothing for the straining angel above her, whose every ragged breath interlaced with her frightened ones.
It all ended as soon as it started. The falling wet snow settled around them, its heavy cascade no longer pattering on the shield of Rhode’s wings.
Neela squinted for what meager light she could access within the shadowy cage of his wings. Over Rhode’s shoulders, a mighty oak branch glinted back at her as it stuck out several feet on each side beyond Rhode’s already condor-length wingspan. Breath somehow rushed into her compressed lungs, which were so tightly flushed against his deep chest.
And that was a pity, because her panic didn’t make her nearly as helpful as she’d hoped.
“Holy shit! There’s a tree on your back!”
“I’m . . . aware . . .”
“No, you don’t understand. With the age of that oak and the length of the branch—it’s a good fifteen feet long at least. Add on the ice encrusting it and the diameter of the wood, how wet the core will be owing to the season, that’s got to be a good thousand pounds!”
Rhode’s shoulders threatened to burst the seams of his coat as he tried to push the weight off them as much as he could. His eyes were squeezed shut, his brow creased in what she had to imagine was both pain and concentration. “Got that.”
“But your metal! It’s?—”
“Dammit, woman, I fucking know, all right?”
Sweat beaded across his forehead as his hips swerved, then steadied with the weight of the rocking branch. Holy hell, he wasn’t just keeping the thing from crushing her but balancing it as well. The man was banking his body so the limb—a limb the size of many mature trees—wouldn’t roll over his head and flatten hers.
“Are you hurt?” he grunted out as he held a plank above her while a tree held its own plank on his back.
“I’m fine. But how can we?—”
“Need to shift.”
“No. Rhodium’s too breakable. It doesn’t have the tensile strength to?—”
Hot breath tickled her ear and brushed across her nose as he tried to push up and look at her. “If you have a better idea, I’m all ears.”
That silver fire swirled in his eyes again, pinning her impossibly further beneath the weight of his stare. Then she sucked in a sharp breath as his hip flexors chiseled out a hard path along her inner thigh. He groaned and tried to tilt his lower body away from her, but he only succeeded in widening his legs a bit to redistribute the weight.
Which put a whole lot more of him front and center against her.
“Fuck, this branch is too heavy.”
“What will happen? If you shift?” The question was her only acquiescence to the inevitable transformation and the only option that would separate their two quickly fusing bodies.
Rhode’s voice softened to a nearly inaudible whisper. “I need my fire. Can’t access it like this. Not yet. Need to incinerate the wood.”
“Why can’t you access it yet?”
He looked away and took that vibrant stare with him.
“Oh.”
The soul bond. Molly and Brass had given her more of the rundown on what happened when a celestial angel connected with their mate, and the reality made her all sorts of worried. In Brass’s case, and that of the other sentinels, their fire was trapped inside them, only to slowly be set free when physical contact with their soul bond increased over time.
There was a great significance to it, as she understood things, one with lasting consequences.
One of those consequences being that the angel could finally access their full fire power, albeit briefly, until the full bond snapped into place.
The wheels were turning over faster in her mind when they stopped in front of a line she’d never considered crossing before.
She had powers, too, didn’t she? Or at least, something like it? What if . . . ?
“What if I touch you? As your soul bond. Would that help fuel your fire?”
Shifting wouldn’t work. They both knew that. There was a reason Cyro’s experimentations involved rhodium and not some stronger metal. Already, Rhode’s wings were struggling, his right one beginning to dip and bend below the left. Another minute or so and she didn’t have the confidence he’d be able to bear the weight any longer.
The branch could be destroyed with angel fire, quickly and succinctly. And if they really were soul bonds, there was only one way to call it forth at that early stage of the connection.
They were as up, close, and personal as two people could get, sure, but it wasn’t like they were skin to skin or anything. If Neela had to, she could wiggle her hand up from where it was pinned and touch the side of his face or something. It was workable, doable. Useful.
But the way his eyes slashed back toward hers told her everything she needed to know about her little proposition.
He’d let the tree crush him first before he let her touch him, and would happily do so.
That truth filled the already infinitesimal space between them, choking out her shorter breaths, even as his breathing changed to keep pace with hers. She couldn’t be sure whether it was the inevitability of her suggestion or the brutal revealed honesty from earlier, but somehow a weight far greater than that of the tree branch seemed to settle around them.
The silence wasn’t helping. With so many of her senses cut off, the lesser-used ones flared to life with the boom of a starting pistol. Rhode’s wide chest not only flattened her into the snow but pushed against her breasts until each of their syncopated breaths lifted them higher above her coat’s open zipper. There was no reprieve from the contact, no place for her nipples to search out a less abrasive respite.
There was only his strength lying flush against her from his sharp collarbones to his warm thighs firmly bracketing hers. They were so close that if she dared to look up again, her lashes would brush against his jawline. Would the skin there pebble the way hers did whenever his breath kissed her nose or her cheek?
Would he hate her more for wanting to find out?
Then his hips shifted, and that singular hardness from earlier pressed into her more ardently, pulsing against her thigh with an insistent warning. Crap.
No, don’t think of it. Do not think of it. He can’t control his body any more than you can at the moment.
Neela was flustered and at a loss for what to do, what to manage. Instinctually, she leaped for what she could latch onto, which so happened to be the spun silk of his shirt where it tucked into his chiseled waistband. His open overcoat’s brushed wool welcomed her touch as it cradled her hands closer to his sides—sides that heaved with a different kind of exertion than what had originally thrown them together.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was apologizing for. Touching him when he so clearly didn’t want her to? Breathing in his air when the sweat on his brow begged for what little fresh oxygen was available? For lying to him about recognizing who he was and not having told him sooner?
It was the dealer’s choice on that front.
“For what it’s worth, I never touched you when you were in Cyro’s grotto. Others did, but I wasn’t one of them. I refused.”
The option of escape had been taken from them both. The walls around them were only as strong as whatever faltering power remained in the impressive male blanketing her from the world. But somehow, that penetrating stare returned and swung back with a force that she wasn’t entirely sure was the lesser of two evils.
And then both of their breaths quickened, setting a rhythm that ebbed and flowed with the unspoken understanding between them.
“Do it,” he snarled, lifting his head so his mouth inched a tad closer to hers. “Fuck, do it quickly.”
“What? Do what quickly? Touch your face?”
A harsh swallow rode the length of his throat, which was close enough for her to feel in her body. Her fingers tightened against his hips, and to her great surprise, he didn’t canter away.
He moved closer .
“It needs to be a kiss,” he said, closing his eyes again. The pain in his words was an audible blow to her heart. “For fuck’s sake, it needs to be a kiss, all right? A simple touch on the face won’t do it at this point. My power, whatever remains of it, is too depleted. The soul bond connection isn’t strong enough yet.” Then he looked at her again, and anger, hot and brutal and as violent as she’d ever seen, lashed out at her from those fiery eyes. “Just do it, and let’s be done with this.”
There was no ounce of compromise in his stare. No acquiescence to their circumstances or acknowledgment of Plan F trumping Plan A. There was only the heated fury she sadly recognized every time one of her kind had been called in to administer more of his treatments when he was a captive and she was a na?ve onlooker.
It was a fury he needed in order to break through the pain of having another charmer touch him. Pain he always knew would come but which he had never known if or when it would relent.
Whether it was her touch or another of her kind, it was all the same to him. It was all repulsive.
A sharp tear pricked at her eye, but she refused to let it fall. She wasn’t entirely sure what had been wounded most keenly. Her dignity? Her spirit? Or more embarrassingly, the fluttering urges of attraction that had parts of her trembling just as much as the body above hers?
The branch creaked its warning, leaving no time for her discomfort or sadness to settle in for the sulk they longed for. Instead, she lifted her chin to be level with his, a true task given how harshly he’d begun to shake. “I’m not the monster you think I am, and I’ll prove it by taking you to Cyro. I’ll show you I am not like him.”
“Just shut up and kiss me already, would you?” he bit out, eyes clenched shut once more.
Resigned to the task, she lifted her lips to his and let the tear fall. She no longer cared what other parts of her chose to separate themselves from her as well.