Page 57 of Mortal Heart

The matter-of-fact way she asked caused him to take her hand and press a kiss to her knuckles. He’d seldom interacted with anyone so adaptive and unfazed by anything that came their way. Thanks to only a handful of clues, she’d figured out he was a fallen angel with breathtaking speed and taken the news almost entirely in stride. The only time he’d noticed her thrown off-kilter even a little was when he revealed his true age—and even that hadn’t unsettled her much. Possibly the only other people who’d reacted so calmly were Alice and Malcolm, and the Guardian warrior Lucy Stone, who lived in what Alice referred to as the “Broken World.” None of them were mundane humans, however, and as such were far more used to interacting with supernatural beings.

“I will be able to tell you more when we get closer to the building.” It felt odd to speak so candidly with someone who had no magic of her own. Then again, Arkady had shown no signs of being at a disadvantage, and power did not come from magic alone. “I’m dampening my remaining angelic power so I don’t alert them to our proximity, as I did during our meeting with Dr. McMahon, until the final moments.”

He saw her wheels turning long before she spoke. “Angels and demons can sense each other?” she asked.

“Always. We are…” Ronan searched for an adequate human word to describe the antagonism between them. The angelic term had no direct translation. “Natural enemies,” he finished.

“Gotcha,” she said briskly. “So if you walked into the tower lobby flying your angel flag for all to see and sense, whatever demons live there would pop out of the woodwork like earthworms on the sidewalk after it rains?”

“Much like that, yes.” He considered her words. “Are you suggesting I do so?”

“Unless you’ve got a better idea. If McMahon isn’t our target, it’s got to be one of the other people who live on the top floor, but we’re not sure who. And nearest I can tell, reaching the penthouse undetected is going to be something close to impossible. Next best thing is to make this demon come to us—or comeatus. The more we talk about it, the faster I’m running out of reasons not to just ring the doorbell.”

The prospect of charging headlong into a confrontation with demons clearly energized her as much as it did him. The obvious problem was, they would no doubt be outnumbered, and though they both carried mundane weapons and he retained some angelic power, the demons would have numbers on their side. As a fallen archangel, he could have ensured Arkady’s survival as well as his own against these demons. As a mortal man, he could not.

He hadn’t realized he hadn’t done a very good job of keeping those thoughts off his face until Arkady practically leaped over the center console and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, flushed with fury. “How dare you,” she snarled, her nose an inch from his own. “How dare you think it’s your job to protect me?”

“Is it not?” He met her angry gaze with his own calm one. “When you served in the army, was it not the desire of each person in your unit to protect the lives of the others, even at the cost of their own life?”

“It’s not the same and you know it,” she shot back.

Clearly this was a sensitive topic for her. As such, he knew he must address it directly and very honestly, or risk losing far more than her confidence in him.

“I think it is.” Carefully, he disengaged her hand from his shirt. “Haven’t we fought side by side? Haven’t you already protected my life with your own?”

She leaned back, her knee on his seat between his thighs, and glared at him. “It’s not the same,” she repeated stubbornly. “You want to protect me because we’re lovers.”

“You’re readingmymind now?” He took her hand and held on when she tried to pull away. “My Valkyrie, I have recognized you as a warrior since I first saw you in the Pelican. I believe I knew you as such even before that, when you spoke to me as I slept in Alice’s house. I do not recall your words, but I know in my soul that I heard you speak of battle, honor, and sacrifice. To have you as my lover is a great honor. To fight at your side is an even greater one. So when I speak of protecting your life, I do so as a brother in armsandyour lover. The latter does not preclude the former.”

Arkady stared at him for a long time, her eyes narrowed. “Did you practice that speech on the way over here?” she asked finally.

“No.” When she continued to eye him, he relented. “Some of it,” he admitted. “I rehearsed the part about hearing what you said to me while I lay sleeping. I did want to tell you that.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s part of what drew me to you, despite my belief that pleasure and longing are just as much a part of my punishment as pain and mortality.”

She flinched at his words. “It’s as bad as that, huh?”

“It was meant to be, I think.” He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “But I may have looked at my situation the wrong way.”

“Being mortal or human isn’t the punishment some people or beings might think it is. It’s got a lot going for it, really.” She cupped his face with both hands and kissed him. She tasted of coffee and the cinnamon raisin bagel she’d eaten before they left her house. Quick breakfasts and little kisses were a few of the simple joys of mortal life he’d begun to appreciate.

“And if I’m any judge of this sort of thing,” she added, “you’re enjoying the hell out of the pleasure part.”

“That I am.” He raised his eyebrows. “As are you, as the fingernail and bite marks in my back and other places can attest.”

“Mmm.” She licked her lips and eyed him in a way that reminded him of a raptor studying its prey. “Youarea delicious hunk of a man. And I think there are a few places I haven’t gotten to taste yet.”

“Likewise.” He cleared his throat. “However, before we become too distracted, we should return to our original conversation. If you believe our best course of action is to ring the doorbell, as you called it, I’m inclined to agree.”

“Glad to hear you’re on board with my plan. Fly that angel flag. I’m ready to see what we can do against this particular enemy.” She returned to her own seat, shifted gears, and headed toward Carmody’s enormous porte cochère. “But I’m warning you: if you start acting like some googly-eyed man-child or go allHulk smashtrying to keep me from getting hurt because we’re getting it on and not because we’re on the same team, I will shoot you.”

His mouth twitched, but he held back a chuckle and nodded gravely because she seemed dead serious. “Understood.”

As they approached the tower, he lowered the shields that hid his angelic power. Doing so made him uneasy. Even archangels rarely deliberately antagonized demons other than in purposeful combat. From the earliest eons of the universe, both angelic and infernal beings had recognized the futility of endless warfare and the myriad ways that balance was necessary to sustain existence. No angelic law forbade it, so he had no reason to expect reprisals from Michael, but he couldn’t help but feel as though he was casting a stone into a vast body of water without a clear sense of how large the ripples might be or how far they might reach.

He could have tried to summon a vision to guide his decisions, but he hadn’t done so voluntarily for centuries and had no intention of doing so now. The fleeting thought did, however, conjure the memory of the vision he’d glimpsed in the Pelican’s parking lot of himself trapped in a cage as Arkady fell with a knife in her heart. The penthouse of a very modern glass-and-steel skyscraper seemed an unlikely place to find a subterranean lair made of bare rock, and Alice’s survival had proven his visions were not the inevitable events he’d once believed them to be. Still, he couldn’t dismiss the vision…or shake the growing uneasiness in his gut.

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