Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 118699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 593(@200wpm)___ 475(@250wpm)___ 396(@300wpm)
He should’ve been embarrassed, full of shame—but there was no such thing with Zanaya. They were both as greedy, both as ruled by obsession, and when the time came that he had to let her go so she could return to her archangel, he had to fight his basest instincts. They wanted to cage her, keep her.
“I would rather cut my own throat than live in a cage,” she said to him when he spoke his desire aloud. “Poke out my own eyes so that the needles go straight into the brain. Drop my body onto a spike that obliterates my heart. Anything it takes, I would do. I will not be a caged bird, Alexander.”
Then she kissed him, her nails leaving clawed trails down his chest.
* * *
* * *
“It’s insanity,” he said to Callie the next time they met. “How we are with each other. It’s not normal in any sense of the word.” At times, he felt as if Zanaya was the most dangerous creature to him in all the world. “And yet I can’t let her go.”
“It worries me, too,” Callie murmured. “This obsession I see in you. Will you start a war for her, Alex?”
He clenched his jaw. “No. Because to do so would be to lose her. She will fight for her archangel.”
“I’d hate her for doing this to you,” Caliane said, “but there is the loyal heart you both share. She’s ruthless and arrogant and all too aware of her own power, but she also has a heart full of devotion. I watched her, you know. For you. I checked to see what she does when she’s away from you. She fights. She trains. She cares for her hounds and spoils her cats. She supports her friends and comrades. And she never lies with anyone else.”
Alexander hadn’t needed Caliane to tell him that; he knew. How could Zani lie with anyone else when what burned between them was an inferno that scarred until neither could be with any other? Alexander lay with no other, too, his devotion as dark and as brutal as her own.
That devotion continued to build and build until it was too dark, too demanding. Jealousy took root inside him in slow whispers fanned into rage by distance and loneliness, a green-eyed snake that craved to possess her, to keep her. The rational part of him knew that was the worst possible thing he could demand of her, but he wasn’t rational anymore.
“I love you!” He slammed a fist into his heart, the two of them alone on a desolate mountaintop cloaked in night. “More than is sane for me to love! Yet you’d rather spend far more time with other men!”
“I’m a general, you ass! Those men are part of my squadrons! I’m the one with room to complain!” The mountain winds howled as they moved through the peaks, blowing Zanaya’s unbound hair back from her face in a tangle of purple-hued silver. “Do you think I don’t see all those angels and vampires fluttering their eyelashes at you and all but falling out of their clothes whenever you walk by?”
He waved off the ridiculousness of the idea. “Are you questioning my word?”
“Are you questioning mine?” she yelled back.
“Zani.” He gritted his teeth. “It’s you I love.”
“Your love comes with conditions,” she snapped back. “You would make me one of your minions, simpering at your feet.”
Anger made his wings glow, his hands fist. “No one simpers in my court!” Alexander had no desire to be surrounded by those who’d say yes regardless of their true opinions. That way lay a weak and spineless court. “How dare you accuse me of such!”
“I dare because you are not my archangel!” She kicked at the remains of a calcified tree with her booted foot. “You will never be my archangel! I will never move into your territory! I do that and our relationship is over!”
“That is shite!” Shoving both hands through his hair, he strode halfway across the mountaintop in a futile attempt to release the angry energy inside him—only to turn around and come right back to stand toe-to-toe with her. “Archangels have lovers that live in their own territories! Relationships continue!”
“I am not those lovers, and you are not those archangels,” was the harsh rejoinder, her wings snapping open in a martial movement before snapping shut as hard. “You don’t know how to be anything but the ruler of all that you survey. I will not be ruled by my lover. Not now. Not ever!”
“I don’t wish to rule you!”
“Wishes matter naught when you’re an archangel used to getting your way!” Her face was incandescent with heat, her feet set apart, the two of them so close that her chest brushed his with every breath. “You say all these pretty words, but when it comes down to it, Archangel Alexander, you like to get your own way.”