Chapter 20
TWENTY
Know which rules can be broken and which are set in stone.
LUCA
I never thought I would have this.
Celine curled on the couch, her head on my shoulder. Every time she exhales, the hair behind my ear sways and tickles my neck. My basilisk is content. It’s pleased to have her safe and close where it can keep an eye on her.
The TV casts vivid, saturated colors around the living room, bringing the tropical island vibe to our midnight desert hideaway. On the screen, palm trees sway in the breeze as the cast members smile and flirt their way into one dramatic situation after another.
Malach is fucking engrossed.
And it’s killing me. I may not survive the effort it takes to keep from laughing my ass off. Brow furrowed, he watches the dating show with the gravity that human political correspondents reserve for a fucking congressional hearing.
Whenever one of the contestants says something illogical or ridiculous—which is almost always—he frowns, and I watch in real time as he puzzles out their possible meaning. More than once, I’ve caught his lips moving as he repeats a phrase.
Fuck me, I think he’s trying to memorize them. I swear, if Malach wakes up talking like a reality-star diva tomorrow, I’m going to lose it.
“His intentions aren’t honorable,” Malach mutters, jerking his thumb toward the roided-up gym bro Celine and I love to hate. His name is Wolfe, something Celine and I always botch, which is laughable considering how weird it is.
“Agreed,” I whisper. “And there’s no way he’s good in bed—in another episode he said he doesn’t even eat.” Which, incidentally, is the most heinous crime a bisexual can commit. Wolfe should be locked up for sheer audacity.
Malach drags his focus away from the screen and looks at me. “Eat? He must eat something to maintain that musculature.”
I blink at him and wait for his poker face to crack, but it never does. His green eyes are impossibly earnest. Swallowing a groan, I brace myself. I have no choice but to explain. I can’t allow Malach to keep wandering through life—in any realm—knowing nothing about head.
Do it for the greater good, Luca.
“Not food.” I clear my throat. “I mean pussy. Or ass. Or pussy and ass.”
Malach’s eyes flicker to Celine. “I see,” he says. “Eating is slang, and the act is pleasurable?”
I nod. “If it’s done right. What do you call it in your realm?”
He frowns, a muscle in his jaw flexing. “We don’t discuss intimacy casually or around others.” Okay, that makes sense, but— A crazy suspicion enters my mind.
“Have you ever?” I ask, keeping my face as neutral as possible. Malach and Celine were betrothed young. Neither of them has explained what that means, but he’s rigid about rules . . .
“I have maintained my vows,” Malach says simply and without shame. “However, I do not begrudge Celine the life lived while we were apart. She believed our paths would never cross again; I could not accept that.”
My respect for him grows. To have waited for Celine all this time . . . gods, he must love her nearly as much as I do. I wonder if she knows he’s a virgin. It’s not my place to tell her. Malach is confiding in me. I won’t betray his trust by spilling his personal business.
“Did she forgive the vampire?”
His subject change surprises me as much as his actual question. Malach skipped the club tonight, saying he needed to check in with his guards, so I’m not sure how he knows Alistair showed up at the Fang. Did he pop in and I missed him, or does he have his guys spying on us?
“Forgive isn’t the word I would use,” I mutter, remembering the fury on Celine’s face when she stumbled from the storage room earlier.
I expected to get yelled at on the way home for not warning her that he was in there. Instead, she pressed her nose to the glass of my passenger window, brown eyes locked on the crescent moon like it might hold the answers to all her questions.
“I don’t understand it,” Malach admits, drawing my attention back to him.
The bright light from the TV casts his face in a series of harsh, chiseled lines. With his brow furrowed and his jaw clenched, Malach looks carved from stone, like he caught me on a bad day and paid the price.
I scrub my hand over my jaw, stubble scraping the skin of my palm. How can I explain toxic attraction to a virgin who’s still getting the hang of the English language? Words fail me, and I finally shrug. “I wouldn’t dare say it to either of them, but they don’t understand it either, Malach.”
“It hurts her,” he says, his face twisting with anger.
I sigh. “It would hurt her worse to let him go.”
Not that I think Alistair would allow that to happen without a fight.
He watches Celine with a feral intensity that’s more familiar to me than the unshakable dedication in Malach’s eyes.
An obsessed monster I understand—I walk around with its twin in my chest every day.
It’s exhausting. Some days I think it would have been better if my parents had allowed my basilisk to be bound instead of fleeing to Earth to prevent it.
“Do you miss home?” I ask before I think better of it, not sure what I’m even getting at. Celine doesn’t talk about the celestial realm. I have almost no picture in my mind of the place she spent most of her life.
“That’s a difficult question.” Malach looks at the TV, his shoulders tensing. “Have you ever arrived somewhere and been overwhelmed? By the sights, the smells, the feeling that settles into your skin that you belong there?”
He doesn’t expect an answer; he’s setting the stage, painting a picture for me, but his description is as foreign to me as their realm.
I was born on Earth. Mom and Dad planned their escape from the monster realm as soon as they found out about me.
I’ve spent almost thirty years moving between Fringe communities and hiding what I am .
. . Many things catch my interest, but the sense of home he’s describing—I doubt I’ll ever experience it.
“When I hear the hum of the transportation pathways or see a child’s face after their wings hold them up for the first time, that’s home. Warm, comforting”—Malach clears his throat—“and overshadowed by the agony of watching my realm be cut to ribbons.”
I make a noise to let him know I’m still listening. I asked, but I wish I could take it back. It’s upsetting Malach to explain, and I’ve ruined the relaxation of our trash TV night.
“You asked me if I miss it, but I miss what it should be . . . what it could be. I’ll miss the home we might have had until I draw my final breath.
” Malach looks at Celine as she sleeps, and his face softens.
“Yet nothing compares to how I felt when she left. As if half my soul and all my heart were torn from my body. I thought I would never draw a full breath or sleep a restful night again.”
“You helped her get out though,” I say, remembering Celine’s surprise when learning how she stumbled upon the illegal gateway to Earth. Malach worked behind the scenes, making sure she would find it while never knowing he was to thank for helping her escape.
“Yes, I did, and I would do it again. If she needed my lungs to breathe, I would cut them out for her too.” Wincing, Malach rubs the heel of his hand against his chest. “I would sink to the depths of the sea to spare Celine pain. That is my duty and my honor because she is my home.”
Fuck, that’s poetic.
I focus on the TV, giving him space to process.
It’s four o’clock in the morning. We should go to bed—Celine’s obviously exhausted—but I’m reluctant to move. On the screen, Ashley M. spills her mimosa, dousing Breanna in a drink that in my professional opinion looks about 80 percent champagne and 20 percent orange juice.
No wonder there’s constant drama on this show; they’re always fucking—
Glass shatters in slow motion. I shoot to my feet. Celine is only a second behind me as the room-darkening shades ripple from the impact of gods know what.
I watch, transfixed, as a glowing ball rolls across the floor, silent and pulsing. It’s beautiful and hypnotic—hard to look at and harder to look away from. The light throbs like a heart, shining brighter with every beat. It should cast shadows, but there’s nothing.
I squint. My eyes water.
Then the orb begins to sing, a high-pitched, awful wail that echoes inside my bones.
“Fuck!” Celine covers one ear with her left hand and reaches for the orb with her right.
Malach shoves her out of the way. “Get down!” He grabs it himself, hissing, and throws it back out the window. A second later, a sound like a million bells ringing all at once deafens me. It’s chased by a resonant hum and the grind of crunching metal.
I blink in confusion, my ears ringing.
A flash of red zips by me.
Celine yanks on the deadbolts with one hand and grabs Malach’s massive sword with the other. Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. I stumble over to her, slapping the flat of my hand against the door to hold it shut.
“Baby, wait! We can’t storm out there; we don’t know what’s going on. You were asleep thirty seconds ago!”
“They’re going to escape,” she hisses. “They threw a koil’nashra through my window.”
Malach lays his hand on her shoulder, then yanks it back, his face twisting with pain.
I smell blood, and my eyes bulge as I process the damage to his hand. “Shit, man, that doesn’t look good.” His palm is raw, the skin shriveled and uneven—like the first few layers were burned or ripped off.
“Listen to Luca,” he rasps. “They’re trying to lure us out.”
Celine grits her teeth; her eyes caught on his ruined hand. “There’s nothing stopping them from throwing more of those,” she argues. “We’re fish in a barrel.”
“Wait a second,” I interrupt. “They don’t know what I am, right?”
Malach raises his eyebrows. “S’lach likely doesn’t know anything about Celine’s associates yet. He hasn’t had time, and you hide your heritage well.”
I jerk my head toward the shattered glass. “This is a shot in the dark.”
“Yes,” Celine says, her face pinched. “And it almost worked.”