Page 59 of Angel Of Darkness

“I wasn’t your guardian angel.” Time for more truth. No, this moment, he’d tell her everything because she deserved no less.

A door slammed. He glanced to the left. The trucker was heading inside the stop. Keenan waited for him to leave the lot.

Then...

“There are a lot of angels. So many different kinds. More than even the theologians realize.” All with different jobs and duties.

“Some guard,” he admitted. The stories had that part right. “Others punish.”

Her eyes widened.

“Some kill.”

She blinked.

“That night, in that alley...” He forced himself to take a step back. “You were supposed to die.”

“I did.”

“No.” A rough laugh broke from him. “You were supposed to die. Permanently. Not to wake as a vampire. The vamp who attacked you was supposed to drain you, to rip your throat out, and to leave your broken body in the alley.”

“Don’t worry about sugarcoating,” she muttered, and he saw her flinch. “I can get the visual on my own.”

His fingers slipped down her cheek. “I couldn’t let it happen. I…hesitated.”

She stilled at his touch. “You were there to kill me.”

“I was there to take your soul to the next life.” He glanced down at his hand. “One touch. That’s all it would have taken. That’s all it ever took. One touch and death came.”

Now she reached for him and curled her fingers around his hand.

“Instead of touching you,” he said, voice hardening, “I touched him.”

“Keenan...”

“I broke the rules. I took a life that wasn’t mine to claim. I disobeyed, and they tossed my ass into hell.”

“Hell?” Her nails bit into his skin. “Oh, Keenan.”

“My wings were burned away when I fell. Fire blazed through my whole body, and when I hit, when I finally landed...” Keenan rasped out a breath and let his gaze scan the lot before coming back to her. “I didn’t even know who I was. What I was. I woke up, in the middle of an empty field, the earth scorched around me, and when a farmer ran to help me, I just knew that I-I shouldn’t touch him.”

One touch had always meant death.

She didn’t speak. Nicole just watched him in the darkness, and he knew she saw too much with her vampire eyes. “After heaven, trust me, this place—it was hell to me.” The emotions. The pain. The hunger. The thirst. The need. He hadn’t understood any of them. He’d been lashed with agony, again and again, and hadn’t realized why.

Because when he’d first woken, he’d known nothing but pain and rage.

Until he’d slowly started to remember...her.

Heaven.

Hell.

Falling.

“It took a little while, but I finally remembered.” Not everything. There was some time lost between his fall and the moment he’d woken up in that field. When he tried to recall those days, he heard the whispers of fire and the echoes of screams.

“I remembered,” he said quietly, “and then I came after you.”

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