She knew Ransom, how loyal he was, how he’d bleed for others, but she was cut from the same cloth. You wouldn’t know about his connections if it wasn’t for me, so this decision is mine. And I won’t bring him in.
Elena, my city is under a stealthy attack. Raphael’s tone was a blade, his face coolly expressionless in a way that made her want to push at him until he dropped the mask. I can’t allow you to protect a friend at the cost of losing my territory.
Is that a threat you’ll go over my head? Aware her temper had been hair-trigger of late, she tried to maintain her grip on it. You’d make me an accomplice in the betrayal of a friend? It was a breach of trust she’d never expected. What if it was one of your Seven?
He isn’t. He’s a mere mortal.
17
The cold response was an emotional slap, another reminder that when push came to shove, mortals remained disposable to Raphael.
Fine, she said, conscious that something precious was about to break between them, a fracture that could never be repaired. You do what you like, but you have to know I’ll never again trust you the same way.
A faint glow, his wings white fire in the darkness. Emotional blackmail?
No. No anger now, simply a spiraling sense of incipient loss that made her chest hurt, her jaw clenched so hard that pain shot up her temples. I’m fighting to retain my sense of honor, of loyalty. If I can’t trust you not to abuse the information I give you about my friends, how can you ask me to tell you anything?
Our conversation isn’t over. Hauling his consort bodily around when she turned back to the donor station, Raphael extended his glamour to cover her.
What else is there to say? A hardness in her eyes that he hadn’t seen since the very beginning of their courtship. A mere mortal, isn’t that your final judgment?
No one could push him to the edge faster than Elena, slamming right through centuries of unyielding control. I allowed Sara into the Refuge. It had been an act that went against their most deeply held laws, permitted only because he took full responsibility for Sara’s silence. The others believe I erased her memories. Only for you did I leave her mind untouched.
That’s supposed to make me grateful forever? A red flush high on her cheekbones, the ring of silver around her irises glittering against the paler gray. Love doesn’t work like that.
Yet it allows you to turn your back after throwing such words at me? A memory of the question she’d asked that had sent him hunting Jeffrey, a reminder of the poison that continued to act on her, years after it had been introduced into her life.
He realized he couldn’t allow her to remain blind to that toxic influence. I’m not your father, Elena.
Her breath coming fast and shallow, she shook her head. Jeffrey has nothing to do with this.
He has everything to do with it, Raphael countered, thrusting his hands into her unbound hair as she raised her own hands to grip at his arms, as if she would shove him away. We will not go through eternity with you expecting the worst from me.
A visible flinch, but his stubborn, furious consort refused to back down. That’s not what I’m doing. Her body trembling from the force of her emotions, she said,I know you, and I know how you see humans: as fireflies that live and die in a heartbeat, not worth anything.
I fell in love with a mortal! Until she was his eternity. Do you question that, too?
Her eyes widened at the enraged question. “No,” she whispered aloud, before returning to mental speech. Your love is the one constant in my life, but I’m so afraid of what immortality will demand from us, what it’ll steal.
It can take nothing we do not give.
Then you need to listen to me. Stubbornness again, her expression that of the warrior she was, one who’d fight to the death to protect those who had earned her loyalty. My friends, they’re my family. I need to be able to protect them—if you take that away from me, you may as well cut out my heart.
It had been an age since he’d seen mortals as she did, since he’d formed a friendship with a simple farmer who’d come to be a man he trusted not only with his life, but with Elena’s. I have forgotten, it seems, that I, too, once had a human friend I wished to protect. He’d failed, Dmitri’s life torn asunder—and the failing had marked Raphael, too, changed him in ways that could never be undone.
Then you understand. Elena’s hair shone white in the harsh light that lit up the donor doorway. It’s not safe for my friends to be drawn deeper into the immortal world. Not unless you trust them to keep—
No. Our laws exist for a reason. And it wasn’t simply because angels thought humans beneath their notice. The games immortals play would break mortals in a heartbeat.
Silence from his consort, followed by a simple, resolute declaration. Then he can’t be here.
He can’t be here, Raphael agreed, his mind playing back the memory of the day he’d found Dmitri gripping a blood-drenched knife, his chest a ruin, the other man having attempted to carve out his heart in an attempt to join his murdered family.
Raphael would never forget Dmitri’s grief and the horror that had preceded it . . . and he would not have Elena carry such memories for all eternity. I will not force you to drag your friends into our world.
Emotionally shaken as a result of an argument she knew had drawn a bright line in the sand of the life she was building with her archangel, their relationship coming out of it stronger rather than fatally damaged, Elena returned to the task of untangling the complicated murk of scents around the donor door.
Even so focused, she couldn’t forget what Raphael had said: We will not go through eternity with you expecting the worst from me.
She’d argued against his perception, but now found herself considering if it was true. Had her father scarred her so badly as a child? No, it was far more complicated than that. “The greatest breach of trust,” she found herself saying softly, having moved away from the area under surveillance, “was my mother’s.”
His eyes told her he knew her meaning. Understood the agony that had shredded her as she stood mute beside Marguerite’s grave, Beth’s tiny hand clasped in hers. Jeffrey had been behind them, his hands on their shoulders, his body their rock, strong and there.
“I was so angry at him for not stopping her.” Catching a suspicious concentration of scent, she went down into a crouch, her wings on the cold asphalt. “After the funeral, I struck out at him, screaming that it was his fault when I knew it wasn’t.” Her mother hadn’t survived Slater Patalis and what he’d done to her two oldest babies, no matter if her body had made it out alive.
“You were a child.”
Elena shook her head at Raphael’s response. “I was old enough to know better, but you know what? Jeffrey never, not once, argued against my irrational accusations. Because he blamed himself, too.”
She hadn’t thought about those first days after her mother’s suicide for years, only what came after, when Jeffrey’s broken heart had translated into a cold rage that had him erasing Marguerite from the house and their lives. “Every time I think I understand what we are—Jeffrey and I—I discover another facet and suddenly it’s not so sim—”