Nalini Singh - Archangel's Kiss

Elena lay in Raphael’s arms, her body exhausted in the most sexual of ways. The archangel had kept his promise. He’d made her scream. Her heart was still thumping with the echo of searing pleasure when she fell into the warm darkness of a peaceful sleep. So peaceful that it took her a while to understand what it was she was hearing.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

“Come here, little hunter, taste.” A finger pressing to her mouth.

She clamped her lips tight, but the taste, it seeped inside anyway, an insidious, unspeakable thing. No! Her mind refused to realize what it was, refused to understand.

But the monster wouldn’t let her escape. “Isn’t Belle delicious?” His eyes were darkest brown, ringed with a thin circle of bloodred. “I saved some for you. Here.” Hands brushing away her sister’s golden blonde hair from her neck, revealing the raw meat that was her throat. “I think it might still be warm.” His face nuzzling into Belle’s neck, his hand on breasts that had just begun to bud.

The scream tore out of her. “No!” She was on him, fists and hands like claws, teeth and kicks and fury.

But even a hunter-born wasn’t as strong as a vampire full grown. A vampire glutted with blood. He played with her, made her believe she’d hurt him. And when her guard was down, when she was gasping from the fight . . . he kissed her.

Elena woke choking.

Black spots hazed her vision, threatening to tip her into unconsciousness until the scent of the rain, of the sea, infiltrated her mind. Fresh and wild and far from the horror she could feel in her mouth, it wrenched her out of the loop of nightmare and had her sucking in air as she turned desperately into Raphael’s arms.

They locked around her, an absolute, unbreakable haven. “Shh, I have you.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Raphael held Elena tight, so tight he had to be putting bruises on her. But still she trembled, her words garbled, her fear so thick he could taste it. “Elena.” He kept saying her name, kept brushing his mind across hers until she seemed to see him, to know him. Continuing to hold her, he swept his hand down her wings over and over, soothing her, reminding her that she was here, with him, not locked in a past she couldn’t escape.

He kept his own anger, his rage, contained behind iron shields. Archangels could do many things, but not even he could turn back the clock and erase the evil that had ravaged Elena before she’d had a chance to grow.

“He fed me Belle’s blood.” It was a husky whisper, as if her throat was torn from screaming.

“Tell me.”

“My sister’s blood. He kissed me, feeding me Belle’s blood.” Rage and horror and a bewildered kind of pain. “I tried to spit it out but he covered my mouth, my nose, and I drank it. Oh God, I drank it.”

Sensing the hysteria beginning to retake hold of her, he tugged her head from his chest, taking her mouth in a kiss that was pure, untrammeled demand. She froze for a fractured instant before her hands thrust into his hair, before her body twisted until she slid beneath him, her legs wrapping around his waist.

There was a wild kind of desperation in her kiss, a kiss flavored with the salt of her tears. She wanted to forget. He’d do anything in his power to help her find what peace she could. He took her as hard as she wanted, pinning her wrists to the sheets with one hand, shoving her thigh aside with the other, and sliding into her welcoming sheath in a single thrust.

Her scream echoed into his mouth. He kissed her through the taking, through the raw, almost painful emotion of their joining. He kissed her until she gasped for breath, until her eyes went blank with pleasure, with passion, with ecstasy. And then he kissed her as she came down from the peak.

“Again,” he whispered into her mouth.

She met him stroke for stroke, her hips rising in welcome, in demand. Tugging her hands free, she held him to her, trailing her mouth over his cheek, his jaw, his neck. At the end, she buried her head in his neck and simply held on . . . let him hold her, let him protect her.

It was her trust that brought him to his knees, that shoved him over the edge and into her arms.

“Thank you.” Elena refused to let Raphael move off her body, her lips brushing his ear as she spoke, the dark silk of his hair cool against her flesh. “Thank you.”

“I would take your nightmares, Elena.”

“I know.” And that he hadn’t forced them from her when she could feel the savage need he had to wipe away her pain, it made her heart expand impossibly more. “But they’re a part of the package.”

She hadn’t voiced the question, but he knew.

“It’s a package that belongs to me.” No hesitation, no sense of him pulling away.

“I’m so messed up. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“You have lived.” Untangling his arms, he used them to brace himself above her, his forearms forming a bracket around her head. “As have I. Would you throw me back?”

The idea of losing him was a violent pain in her heart. “I told you—you’re mine. No getting away now.”

Lips on her own, a slow, so slow, kiss that curled her toes, made the nightmare seem a lifetime away. Her breasts rubbed against his chest as she drew in deep, trembling breaths. “Something in this place . . .” Shaking her head, she pushed damp strands of hair off her face. “The death, all this death. It’s fertile ground for my imagination.”

“You don’t believe it was a true memory?”

“I don’t want it to be.” A whisper, because deep inside she knew it wasn’t just a figment of her mind. “If it’s true . . .” Her eyes burned. “He came for me and he left a piece of himself inside me.”

“No.” Raphael forced her to meet his gaze, the cobalt having overtaken his irises until it was all that remained. “If he made you drink your sister’s blood”—he spoke through the cry she couldn’t hold back—“then you carry a piece of her.”

“How is that any better? I can taste her.” Her hand went to her own throat. “It was thick, rich, full of life .” The horror of it was a noose around her neck.

“Even my mother,” Raphael said, one hand cupping her face, “no matter what she became at the end, never blamed me for that which couldn’t be changed. Your sister, I think, was a far gentler creature—one who loved you.”

“Yes. Belle loved me.” She needed to say that, to hear it out loud. “She used to tell me all the time. She would’ve never called me a monster.” It had been her father who’d done that.

“I will not have a child of mine become an abomination!” Hands shaking her, shaking her so hard she couldn’t speak. “Don’t ever bring up that scent nonsense again. Understood?”

“Tell me something about your mother,” she blurted out, her soul too brittle to handle the memories of the night her father had first hurt her with his words.

It had been a month after they buried her mother. Awash in a black wall of anguish, she’d brought up something she hadn’t even whispered about for three long years. Her hunter sense had been the only constant in her life by then, and she’d thought Jeffrey would understand her need to cling to it. But his anger that night . . . “Something good,” she added. “Tell me a good memory about your mother.”

“Caliane had a voice like the heavens,” he said. “Not even Jason can sing as beautifully as my mother.”

“Jason—he sings?”

“His is perhaps the most magnificent voice in all angelkind, but he has not sung for centuries.” He shook his head when she glanced up. “Those are his secrets, Elena. They’re not mine to tell.”