The Graceless Fall

Caterina Fontana never learned the name of the stranger who pulled her off a Fifth Avenue curb an instant before a city bus would have ended her.

Three days later, Raq is standing on her Brooklyn stoop, large enough to fill the doorway, dressed as a man and already offering an insurance tale that refuses to be false.

He keeps watch through the Bensonhurst nights, mends household things she did not ask him to touch, and treats every cup she owns as if his hands might ruin it.

When the truth finally comes, it is worse than anything Cate had pictured: he is a wingless exile bound to earth, ancient beyond the words she was raised with, and heaven has barred him for a transgression that still follows him.

Raq spent ten thousand years understanding the cost of being seen, yet the night he saved her he broke a restraint he had kept for an age, and every gaze once fixed on him is now fixed on her.

He should vanish and let her live, yet Cate has started leaving a lamp on for him, and he wants her with a devotion that could outlive the world.