Page 45 of To Tame An Angel

“Save me?” He raised a brow.

“No. Replace you,” I said, breath at my throat.

He tightened. “You’ll have no choice.”

“I don’t give a shit,” I said with conviction. “I don’t.”

I took his face and pulled him in. He was still tense, but his fingers tightened on my waist.

“Then let’s leave,” he said. “Come with me. There’s a place deep in the forest rumored to be free. That’s where I was going when I left. Somewhere far away from these laws.”

His words filled me with fear, fear of what would happen if I, the general’s daughter, were to run away. They might stop seeking an escaped angel-man, but they wouldn’t stop seeking me. They’d believe he’d taken me, held me against my will. They would comb the forest just to find us. No. We had to be smart about this.

I pulled him inside, for we didn’t need curious ears to listen. I closed the door and turned to him.

“You don’t want to,” he said tightly, misreading my actions.

I shook my head and held him again, threading my fingers into his. “We will plan it. We have time. When the pressure rises from my mother to get another man, we’ll leave. In the meantime, we plan things correctly. If we leave now, like this – Tannor, they won’t stop seeking me. They’ll blame you for our escape and when they do find us, they’ll not be merciful. To do this right, they need to think we died.”

His eyes darkened as he studied me. There was a softness to his face, as if he didn’t believe anyone would sacrifice anything for him.

“I can’t ask you to leave. It’s not right. They’ll seek you because they love you. You mean something to them,” he mumbled.

There was a pain at the thought of not seeing my sisters again. My mother, despite everything, was still my mother. She’d never meant me harm, never abused me, always taught me things even if I disagreed with her actions. I would venture out into an unknown world without family. Just Tannor, who I’d known only a few days. Still, it felt deeper than anything I experienced before. An intimacy that was natural.

“But you also mean something to me,” I said, twisted in my own choices, bouncing between two rights. I lived in a world where both coexisted.

“I shouldn’t,” he said, and there was a soft, resigned intonation to his tone. “I accepted a long time ago that I meant nothing. I didn’t even mean anything to my mother, who let them take me. Who coldly stood by as I cried for her, asking her to save me. She never did.”

My breath was lost at his confession, and I grasped his waist, feeling his heartbeat under my cheek. It was steady and strong and through the beating of his chest; I heard something else. A fluttering. Like a bird, caged, trapped, and desperate.

I gasped.

“What?” he asked.

“Your wings,” I whispered. “They really are in you.”

He stiffened. The wings fluttered with a thunderous sound. “Yes. I told you, they hold you down when they push them into your body and then sew you up. Only the strong survive.”

“Do they really not sedate you? Or did you just say that to upset me?”

He smiled softly, like I amused him. He tucked a hair behind my ear and leaned into me.

“No, Nalla. There’s no sedation. I’m sorry to inform you that all your sex games feel like child’s play compared to that day.”

I felt a twisted agony erupt in my stomach, like a knife splitting me open. Walking around him, I lifted his shirt. He raised his arms to allow my perusal. He looked at me over his shoulder with a smile.

“The scar is gone,” I murmured.

Still, I searched, tracing the lines of his muscular back, the peppered freckles the sun had splattered. When I moved my finger over his shoulder blade, he shivered, and his skin puckered in goose pimples. Then I paused as the pad of my index finger landed on a line.

“Here,” I breathed. I pressed my finger over it, and he winced. “It’s here.”

“Trace it,” he said after a moment of silence. “I want to know where they would be.”

I felt such sadness at his loss. Their wings were part of them. It made them beautiful and admirable. Some men’s wings expanded out ten feet wide, solid and strong and able to carry three times their weight. And we’d taken them and castrated them for revenge. Because first they’d castrated us and so we must make them pay no matter how long ago the past lived. So, the world was never righted. The world was a continuous wheel oiled by the wrongs of the past.

I knew then that I would leave with him. I couldn’t fix the world, change it or better it. But I could change his world and mine. We could start new. Like equals.

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