“Mahiya.”
Fingers tucking back a tendril of hair. “Yes?”
“I think,” he said, reaching across to cup her chin, brush his thumb across her lower lip, “you must decide something tonight.”
19
Mahiya tidied away the tea things after Jason left to change, carrying them down to her small private kitchen. Where she poured herself a glass of ice-cold water. “Dear God.”
Jason was . . .
Shuddering, she rolled the cold glass over her neck. But, in spite of the sexual fire that smoldered between them, threatening to turn her bones molten, she had no rose-colored lenses clouding her eyes and her judgment, understood that Jason was a top-of-the-food-chain predator with loyalty to a rival archangel. More, he was a spymaster with centuries of experience at intrigue, could well be playing her for reasons of his own.
But . . . he made her no promises, and thus, he would not break them. He listened to her. Treated her as someone with worth. And if that worth was only in the information she could give him, he was truthful about that, too. She took it as no insult, for Jason was in the business of information.
As for the lack of love words and pretty courtship? Mahiya shook her head. She would far rather be with a man who was honest in his desire than with one who brutalized her with the sweet lies of seduction. Jason had more honor in a single bone of his body than Arav would know in a lifetime.
Heading back upstairs, she refreshed her makeup before pressing a sparkling silver teardrop to her forehead, centering it between her eyebrows. “Yes,” she whispered to her reflection. “The answer is yes.”
The single knock came just then, as if he’d heard her. Slipping her feet into flat silver sandals, she took a deep breath and walked out of the bedroom and across the living area to open the door—to reveal Jason’s harsh masculine beauty showcased in a flawlessly fitted black suit worn with a steel gray shirt.
“You look wonderful.” Beautiful, his hair in that neat queue she felt a sudden urge to undo. “Neha will be pleased.” Jason’s expression didn’t change, and yet she knew—“You care nothing of what Neha thinks.”
“On the contrary,” he said, letting her precede him down the stairs.
Her nape prickled, not in warning, but with the awareness that he was watching her body move. It made her breath catch, her skin stretch taut over her flesh.
“It’s never a smart idea to enrage an archangel,” he continued, “but while she may demand it, Neha will never admire subservience.”
Mahiya shook her head as they exited the palace. “Your opinion is colored by your strength.” A strength she knew he’d had from a very young age. “You can afford to rouse her anger, for she sees you, if not as an equal, then as someone intriguing enough not to summarily kill. You do not know what it is to fear.”
“I wasn’t always the man I am now,” Jason said, a door unlocking inside his mind, spilling a cold shadow across his soul.
She looked at him from the other side of the room, her pretty dark brown eyes filmed over with a whiteness that was wrong. The stump of her neck was crusted with blood where it sat on the table in the corner, as if placed there for just this purpose.
He didn’t scream. He knew never to scream. Instead, he looked at the chunk of meat that had been blocking the trapdoor. It wore a silk sheath of brilliant amethyst.
Amethyst. That’s what his mother always called her favorite color. Amethyst.
It had taken him a long time to say it right, and she’d always laughed in delight when he used the word, her shining black hair dancing in the sunshine.
“Jason.” A softly feminine face lit to glowing warmth by the lamps along the pathway, concern in every line. “You . . . weren’t here. Where did you go?”
Brilliant white sands beneath his small feet, burning hot. The wind waving through the palm trees, sending a coconut plummeting to the sand with a dull thud. The gulls gossiping up and down the wet sand, leaving three-clawed footprints the sea erased with its next crashing arrival.
“Jason! Come in and eat your lunch before it gets cold.”
“A place that no longer exists,” he said gently, and removed the hand she’d placed on his chest . . . to resettle it around his upper left arm, where it wouldn’t get in the way if he had to reach for his sword. “About Arav,” he said, while they were still private, “you have no cause to fear him.”
“He’s very strong.” The concern in her eyes lingered, grew. “Don’t underestimate him.”
“I know exactly how strong he is.” Though they’d never met, the fact the man was one of Neha’s generals meant Jason had made it a point to learn about him—and, in spite of his arrogance and posturing, Arav was no peer of Jason’s. “He is like a peacock, spreading his feathers and squawking loudly to distract you from the fact his body is but weak.”
A stifled laugh, genuine delight that was a kind of music. “I propose a rooster would be the better analogy,” she whispered, “strutting and pecking anyone who gets in his way.” Releasing his arm, she lowered her voice even further as they entered corridors peopled by servants and courtiers both. “He is merely the first. Many will come, hoping to take Eris’s place, or at least the place he would’ve had but for his inability to keep his lusts in control.”
He saw the speculative glances they attracted, made no move to widen the distance between them, the occasional brush of her wing against his a welcome caress. “Did you ever consider Eris your father in truth?”