Reaver(31)

Not so much.

But what did that mean for her? Sometimes she didn’t know if there was any good left in her, either.

“Ah, well.” She dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand, not wanting to delve too deeply into questions she was afraid to be answered. “Hindsight is twenty-twenty, isn’t it?”

Reaver took a deep, shuddering breath as his lungs unfroze. She didn’t have much time to drive him crazy. Which was fun. Maybe a little therapeutic, too. Oh, she wasn’t baring her soul or some shit, but since he already knew she’d fallen on purpose and with the cooperation of three archangels, he might as well know some of the story.

Let him see for himself just how evil she’d let herself become.

“The first two hundred years were the worst. Demons and other fallen angels love to torment the newbie, you know.”

She thought about that. Reaver had lost his wings once, booted out of Heaven and into the human realm as an Unfallen. But he hadn’t entered Sheoul, which would have turned him into a True Fallen, a fallen angel with no hope of ever being redeemed. Remarkable, really. Few Unfallen lasted long in the human realm. The temptation to enter Sheoul and be given new wings and powers as a True Fallen was too great.

“No, you wouldn’t know. Just trust me.” She smiled down at him. “You don’t trust me though, do you? Is it because I’m a fallen angel, or is it because it’s not in your nature to trust easily? Either way, you’re right not to trust me.”

She shoved to her feet, wincing at the multitude of bumps and bruises she’d taken during the battle. Worse than all of it, though, was the throbbing ache in her wing anchors. Unlike her other injuries, the pain of her wings trying—and failing—to regenerate was going to intensify and spread through all of her bones until she was crippled with the agony of it.

Harvester dug the canteen from out of Reaver’s backpack. Returning to him, she straddled Reaver’s body and sank down on his hard abs. “Are you tired of my talking yet?”

Reaver’s expression softened, but was she reading him wrong? He couldn’t possibly like hearing her ramble. Could he? Because if he did, she’d have to stop.

Except she kind of liked that he was listening.

Way down inside the murky deep freeze that was her chest, something stirred. Something bad, like angry wasps. Or butterflies. If she were human, she’d think she was getting sick.

She popped the cap on the canteen and carefully tilted it against Reaver’s lips. Water spilled into his mouth, and he swallowed eagerly. She kept giving him drinks in small doses until he blinked at her.

“Is that a ‘no more’? One blink for more water, two for no more.” He blinked twice. “You do know that if I was feeling evil I’d keep making you drink, right? It would be like angel waterboarding. We could make it a sport. How entertaining.”

Reaver rolled his eyes. No sense of humor, that one.

“You’re going to be talking soon, and that’ll ruin all my sinister plans to torture you with inane babbling, you know.”

One corner of his mouth turned up, knocking loose a crystal bead of water that had lingered on his bottom lip. The drop ran along the seam of his lips, drawing her gaze. Never in her life had she wanted water as badly as she did at this moment. His lips parted, and his tongue swept out to capture the drop.

She swallowed as if she’d been the one to taste the glistening bead, and she found herself leaning into him, rolling from the hips to slowly plaster her upper body against his. Was it her imagination or were his eyes darkening from radiant sapphire to a bold, lavish navy blue? Could he actually be turned on?

His clean scent invaded her senses, permeating every cell in her body. He always smelled good, even when he was covered in dirt, ash, blood, and the remnants of battle. It never took long for that honey-spiced angel fragrance to saturate his skin and obliterate everything else.

She wanted to kiss him. To taste those full lips again. The weird thing was that she always took what she wanted, but for some reason, she was hesitant about this.

Kissing Reaver would annoy him. Maybe even piss him off.

Right. Decision made.

She sealed her mouth against his. Months ago when they’d kissed to seal the sex deal there’d been an instant sense of familiarity the moment their lips touched, a bizarre and disturbing rightness that shook her to the core.

Nothing had changed. The feeling was still there. The strange rightness should scare her, and it did, but it also felt so good she wanted to weep, and that was something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

It was almost as if she was Verrine again, and she and Yenrieth were lying in a meadow together, soaking up the sun. She’d been so happy at times like that, and the only thing that would have made her happier was if she’d been sure he felt the same way about her as she felt about him.