Chapter 26
R hode yanked a sweatshirt from his trunk and punched his arms into it. No fucking way was he going to have this conversation while so much of him was exposed. Hell, a damn hazmat suit wouldn’t have offered him enough coverage. For some wounds, no amount of protection could ever be enough to prevent the gashes from splitting wide open again.
Rhode ran his fingers through his short hair and tried not to think of what it once looked like. And the worst part was that Neela knew. She knew how infested with lice and fleas it had been. How the vermin had gnawed at his scalp so terribly that the only relief he could expect to find was scraping his head against the stone and hoping the salt of his blood was enough to starve the pests to death.
It had never worked. Nothing ever had.
Rhode finally settled on the edge of the trunk, making damn sure no part of that bed was touching him. Neela was too much of a distraction, and he knew himself, knew that if he felt even her pinky toe through the covers, he’d lunge for the opportunity to sink into her again and avoid the responsibility of telling his soul bond the truth in favor of the responsibility of giving her pleasure.
“Before my capture, Chrome and I were responsible for overseeing a defensive mission against Cyro and his advancing armies. They were getting too close to the Empyrean’s gates, and every spy legion I sent out for information came back in pieces. Wings and limbs would be dropped from magic portals that Cyro and his charmers opened up in our territories. The bastard was stretching us too thin, splitting our armies into directions we couldn’t sustain with our numbers. Now I know why.”
“Why?”
“We never knew how he made more of your kind, only that for every one we took out, half a dozen would sprout in its place. If he was creating armies from his own person, with his dark magic, and then regenerating, well, it makes sense now why we were never able to keep up with him.”
“Hindsight’s twenty-twenty,” she said.
“So it is. At any rate, I soon learned that an intelligence breach was the reason my entire legion of seraphim scouts had been slaughtered and their mutilated bodies returned to us outside our gates. They were my angels. I sent them there. And Chrome trusted my judgment.” Rhode shook his head, hoping to fling the memory a thousand miles away from his also-too-trusting soul bond.
But he couldn’t. He owed her and promised her as much.
“The night before the Sealing?—”
“Sealing?”
“The sentinels’ final act of salvation. An all-or-nothing op. Using magic bestowed on them by the celestial mages, all the sentinels stood outside the gates of the Empyrean and drained their power to seal off the gates so no one—neither Cyro, souls, nor the sentinels themselves—could ever enter Heaven again. Not until Cyro and the entire threat to the Empyrean had been eradicated. Unbeknownst to the sentinels, however, enacting the Sealing blasted them out of Heaven and sent them plummeting to the mortal realm with little hope of returning.”
Understanding stilled Neela’s movements.
“Anyway, the night before, I insisted Chrome send me on a final mission to hunt down the source of the breach. He refused, of course, most colorfully, I’ll add, but I didn’t give him a choice, and he knew it. Our numbers were dwindling, and if we couldn’t stop the bleeding, we might as well have opened the fucking doors for the charmers regardless. So I left with a promise not to fail him.”
Rhode swallowed down the bitter memory and the lie it had turned into. “Before I reached the shadow realm, a portal opened above me, and I was shot down. But because I was by myself and not among a legion of seraphim, the charmers that apprehended me surmised what I was there to do and brought me to Cyro, who recognized me instantly.”
Mages, his head was heavy. His neck, his temples, everything throbbed with a renewed ache that had only ever truly ebbed when Neela had begun to run her fingers through his hair.
But, no. He had to get through this.
“Like any good commander, Cyro was after information.”
“What sort of information? Battle plans and such?”
“No, not battle plans. The battle planner.”
A curious crease formed between her brows. “But wouldn’t that be?—”
“Chrome.”
Neela sucked in a breath, and no matter how hard Rhode tried, he couldn’t not turn to her, nor could he stomach keeping things to himself any longer.Mages, he was so damn tired.
“Cyro wanted Chrome, our intelligence master, and since I had zero interest in giving him up, we struck a bargain,” he gritted out.
“A bargain? Why would he offer one if he already had you captive?”
“Because if he had my cooperation on a particular matter, he assured me that he’d have no more need for Chrome or the desire to locate his whereabouts.”
“I see. And you agreed to this right away?” It was clear Neela was trying to parse out the timeline of events, a glimmer of hope sparking in her eyes that perhaps the worst of his suffering had been condensed to just the time she’d known him.
How it hurt to break her heart again.
“You know I did not, little demon,” he said gently. When she closed her eyes, he wished he could close his as well. “It was eons before such an offer was presented to me. Prior to that, well, I won’t give you the details, but suffice it to say, when the time had come to consider giving up the torture I had known in exchange for a new sort of torment, one that Cyro himself admitted was experimental in nature, there wasn’t much left in me that could refuse.”
“To protect Chrome?”
Rhode nodded. “He was—had been—my brother. When I tell you that I would have died a hundred thousand deaths if it meant keeping him safe, know that I speak from experience. So Cyro’s bargain wasn’t really much of one, if you ask me. As long as I’ve known of Cyro, I knew that he’d always been on the hunt for a way to breach the Empyrean’s gates, and as you know, aside from you, charmers cannot exist in the light. He’d been ravenous for a workaround, and then one day, he came to my cell and told me that after many failed attempts, he might have found one that would work.”
Before Neela could latch onto the words failed attempts and let them drag her down into darker places, however, Rhode intervened and smiled. “Just so you know, you are by far the best failed attempt that the world could ever hope to know, and I’m quite glad I was able to experience several of your failures firsthand. Perhaps we can even engage in more of them.”
The eye roll was what he had hoped for, but Neela’s delicious nose wrinkle was the cherry on top. “Ass.”
“On occasion.”
Talking to Neela had become so effortless, despite the friction he’d had to overcome to get to that point. The give-and-take between them was something he could get used to and made his chest lighter for it.
“Cyro was looking for a weapon against the sentinels, as well as a warrior who could breach the Empyrean. He hadn’t yet acquired the relic at the time, so he was testing the assumption that, because I was a being of the Empyrean, I would be able to still enter the gates after whatever testing had been done to me. He was searching for something that would command metal as the sentinels did but would be resistant to so many of the weapons that the charmers crafted to combat the angels. Corrosion, rust, acid—those tactics were what made up the base of their magical warfare, and that worked quite well against the sentinels’ metals, steel, titanium, bronze, etc. They were all highly susceptible to it. But he wanted a warrior who commanded metal and who was resistant to all of that but who could also walk among the Empyreans. He sought out to create a metallic angel army of his own but one immune to the magical warfare that crippled the sentinels. And I was his test subject. That was, if I agreed.”
“Oh, Rhode . . .”
He placed a hand over her ankle, finding he needed her strength more than he thought. “No sympathies, little demon. We cannot change the past. And what choice did I have, really? Return to the torment I knew, knowing my weakness would ultimately lead to a target being placed on Chrome’s back? Or forge ahead and consent to be turned into whatever Cyro would make of me, while my brother remained safe? It was, as the mortals say, a no-brainer.
“So, I consented, provided that the administration of the materials was on my terms. I refused to be forced, and Cyro saw no reason to object. Shortly after, I was handed a syringe of silvery-white liquid, spelled so that my body would accept it. They had chosen to test rhodium for its anticorrosive properties and being inert when it came to most aggressive chemicals. The metal isn’t known to tarnish, tolerates high heat superbly, and is also very rare. All qualities that would prove useful if the sentinels ever met someone like me in combat.
“With nothing left to lose, I took the injection, and that was when my hell truly began.”
“The spells . . .”
“Yes,” he acknowledged. “I wasn’t prepared for the amount of trial and error that went into spell casting or the effects the dark magic, when mixed with the rhodium, would have on my makeup. I lost . . . everything,” he cried out, dropping his head in his hands. “The rhodium, combined with the magic, corroded my body at first. The burns were . . .” He took a deep breath. “I can’t even begin to describe what it was like to have your skin flayed off from the inside out, only to have it grow back again and again, to take new concoctions again and again, hoping for a different result but never going so far as to truly wish for death because if I died, nothing would stop Cyro from going after Chrome.
“So I continued with the treatments and experiments. Some turned me to solid metal but didn’t allow for movement, so I was no better than a patient on an operating table, fully alert but frozen to the slab and able to feel everything they did to me. And try everything they did. At one point, they drained as much of my blood as they dared to, only to replace it with equivalent doses of whatever latest poison they were testing. This went on and on and on, until one day, after a particularly brutal session, I faked unconsciousness just for a few hours of a reprieve, for a few cowardly moments without pain. It worked. They weren’t able to get any new test results until I was awake anyway, so they left me alone, but by the time they were set to return, Chrome and Drea had already found me, freed me, and brought me here. Only in the months after, during my private recovery, did I discover that Cyro’s experiment had finally been a success.”
Rhode inhaled deeply for the first time in ages. Good thing, too, because Neela chose that moment to throw off the covers and fling her arms around his neck. He welcomed the warmth of her bare body and lifted her, along with the rumpled discarded sheet, into his lap.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” he soothed, stroking her hair, wrapping her against him, and comforting her as she comforted him. “Every fucking night, I wish I could say that my time with the charmers is behind me, but I can’t. During my time there, I grew comfortable with the loneliness, the isolation. It’s why I keep my quarters so sparse, why I insisted on rooms so far away from the others. For some reason, a room full of decorations and wall adornments felt like it should be meant for other people, not me. When you go so long without even the barest of necessities, even a bar of soap is a luxury. Imagining my life with the lavish trappings that the sentinels regularly enjoy, or even what I’d enjoyed as a seraph in the Empyrean, always seemed like too large of a hurdle for my mind to consider crossing.” Then he pulled back slightly and cupped the back of her head. “Until you.”
Something shifted in her demeanor, though. Eyes that had been misted with unshed tears darted around the room, taking in bare wall after bare wall. Her teeth claimed her bottom lip, refusing to set it free, even as her skin beneath his fingers began to pebble with goose bumps.
“Neela? What is it?”
“Rhode, there’s something?—”
Three loud consecutive bangs resounded against the metal door to his suite. “We’ve reached a consensus,” Iron hollered. “Meet us upstairs when you’re ready.”