Panties hadn’t seemed important at the time.
“Go,” she said, to restart the bout.
The damn sneaky archangel made a move that meant she had to throw a blade or get taken down hard. The blade ended up quivering in a communication screen. The one that had recently held Charisemnon’s face. She felt a momentary pleasure in that before her archangel lifted his hands, palms up. “Rules are rules.”
Elena narrowed her eyes. “You don’t want to win. You just want me to fight you naked.”
A slow, so slow smile that had her going slick between the thighs. “Off.” A nod at her tank top.
Not about to go down easy, Elena smiled and took off her sweatpants instead. Her loose sleep tank just brushed the top of her thighs. Raphael’s abdomen tightened, all rippling muscle she wanted to lick, his arousal rigid against his pants. “Go,” she murmured while he was still distracted . . . but her archangel obviously had priorities that involved getting her bare ass naked.
He spun toward her without warning, coming at a speed no one could avoid . . . except Elena did. One minute she was right in his path, the only way to evade him to go low and attempt to sweep out his wings, and the next, she was two feet to the left.
They both froze. Stared.
Elena blinked. “Did you see that?”
“More to the point, I didn’t see it.” Raphael lunged toward her again, at the same speed.
Elena found herself crouching on the top of an equipment dolly, like a damn mostly naked bat. She fell off the instant she realized what she was doing. “Ouch,” she said when she landed on the carpet, her wings crackling with lightning on either side of her.
Coming around the dolly to look down at her, Raphael kicked up his lips. “Did you know your favorite tank is so old it’s transparent?” He held out a hand.
Taking it, she hauled him down on top of her instead of letting him haul her up. She succeeded because she’d hooked her foot around his ankle at the same time. He caught himself on his hands before he crushed her.
“I could break your bones.” A dark scowl, but the heat of him was a kiss all over her aroused body.
“Nah. Your reflexes are too fast.” She pressed a wet kiss to his pectoral muscle and that quickly, it wasn’t about play anymore—if it had ever been. “I want you. I need you.” It was a painful ache within, below the momentary amusement of their sparring session. “Everything else can wait.”
His wings began to glow. His kiss was pure raw sex, the hand he thrust under her tank possessive and rough on her breast. Elena licked her tongue against his even as she tugged apart the closures on his pants. She wanted his cock inside her, wanted to close herself around him, wanted to reaffirm the beauty of life after all the death, all the evil.
Shoving up one of her thighs the instant she’d freed the thickness of him, he thrust into her while looking into her eyes. Her back arched, her hands gripping at his body, and her eyes never leaving his. Wrapping her other leg around his waist, she held him tight as he pounded her into the carpet, each stroke hard and deep and relentless.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t distant. It wasn’t the least bit cold.
Sweat slicked their bodies. His throat tasted of salt and Raphael. His groan as he drove deep into her before his body stiffened was nothing eerie or strange. It was life stripped to the core. As was the way her inner muscles clenched convulsively around him as he began to orgasm, the muscles of his body beautiful under the shimmer of sweat.
Pleasure wrecked her.
He collapsed on her afterward, his breath hot against her neck and his body heavy. She could barely breathe, but who cared about that when Raphael was stroking the side of her body and moving slightly in her as they both rode out the aftershocks. “I think I have carpet burn on my butt,” she said when she could speak again.
His shoulders shook under her hands.
And for a few more stolen seconds, they didn’t think about Lijuan or death or the fact Elena had become faster than an archangel.
49
A one-minute shower to hide evidence of their quickie from the smartasses in the Tower, a change into proper sparring clothes, then they went down to the large windowless training ring on a lower floor. “Vivek set up a recording system here for if we want to play back certain moves, figure out weaknesses.” She made her way to the control box and started the system. “I want proof.”
The two of them began as usual, but every so often, Raphael would rush her at full archangelic speed. Her body reacted to get her out of the way the first five times. The sixth time, he’d have smashed her into a wall if he hadn’t pulled himself up.
No matter how many times they tried after that, it didn’t work.
“Seven times,” Elena said, her hands on her knees and her exercise tank plastered to her body—though the stormfire of her wings never faded. “I can do it seven times in a row before it fails.”
“The problem is that you can’t control when it happens.”
“Yep, I don’t feel anything. I just go poof.” She put her hands on her hips. “Let’s invite the others to watch the footage with us.” Their senior people needed to know how she might react if startled in battle. The idea of just disappearing and dropping a fellow fighter in the shit made her grind her teeth, but at this point, all she could do was warn them it might happen.
“First, you need more sleep,” Raphael said. “This can wait a few hours.”
Illium, Dmitri, Janvier, Ashwini, and Honor proved to be in the Tower when she woke. Raphael met her in the training room and they viewed the footage again before asking the others to join them.
Elena was the one who located Honor—the other woman wasn’t far, had just finished up a session with Suyin in a smaller training area. As always when Elena ran into the architect, she felt a visceral punch. The shining hair of ice white, the sharp cheekbones, the striking upward tilt of her eyes, Suyin could’ve been Lijuan in another life.
Except that Suyin’s gaze held a bruised pain Lijuan would never comprehend. “Ellie,” she said with a soft smile that didn’t banish the sadness that shadowed her.
Elena fought the urge to hug her. Suyin was an intensely private angel, her grief and pain contained and held tight. “You’re a lot better than the last time I saw you.” The woman responsible for some of the greatest architecture in angelkind had the type of instinctive understanding of movement that made for gifted athletes and dancers.
“You are kind.” Suyin’s age pressed against Elena’s skin with a power that was uncommon; it always made Elena wonder if Lijuan had tortured and imprisoned her niece not only because Suyin knew the secrets of Lijuan’s stronghold, but because she’d seen Suyin as a possible rival.
“I know I have a long way to go.” Suyin’s voice was a haunting melody, her accent that of an old being speaking a new tongue. “As part of that, I must now do flight drills with Jurgen’s squadron.”
“She’s learned to fight and she’s good at it,” Honor murmured as she followed Elena down the hallway after Suyin had left. “But she’ll never be a warrior. It’s not in her nature.”
Elena thought of Astaad. The Archangel of the Pacific Isles preferred literature over swords, would rather debate a point than start a war, but pushed to the wall, he’d push back as hard.
“For Suyin,” Honor continued, “it’s about never being helpless again when evil rises.”
Then they were at the large training ring, and everyone was soon watching the footage. No one spoke at the first viewing. Illium slowed down the playback for the second viewing and one thing became clear. “You’re not disappearing and reappearing, Ellie. Your wings are morphing to white fire and you’re moving at a speed invisible to the naked eye.”