Page 57 of Angel's Vengeance

God, this family loved Rhode.They really did.

Neela’s heart skipped a beat and then nearly exploded when Rhode squeezed her hand.It wasn’t a pulse of persuasion or a press of reassurance.It was something else.Something ...hesitant?

Curious, Neela looked up, but the stiff set of Rhode’s shoulders and the bob of his Adam’s apple answered her question.He was nervous.Did he ...did heneedher?

But when her soul bond’s flare fluttered to life inside her, she had the answer in spades.

Yes.

And she didn’t delay in delivering her answer.

I’m right here.Neela leaned her shoulder against him, hid their joined hands between their bodies, squeezed back, and held it.Held it for as long as needed, which wasn’t nearly as long as she’d feared.

“It is ...a long story.”Rhode sighed.

Then several things happened at once.Glasses stopped clinking, chips stopped crunching, and butts found seats as Rhode recounted, in only as much detail as absolutely necessary, the intention of Cyro’s experimentation plan on him.The mechanics of his metallic power.The anticorrosive elements.How, despite the harm he’d suffered mentally, that physically Rhode couldn’t be harmed by the same dark magic the demon leader had used on the rest of the sentinels.Neela’s heart bled as, for the second time that day, he had to rip open wounds that had only just begun to even flirt with the healing process, let alone get on a first-name basis with the idea.

When it was over and Rhode had squeezed out every last drop of willpower so that he might finally face his brothers again, he lifted his head.What greeted him was a room full of family, standing shoulder to shoulder, with mates hugging mates, and either tears or swirls of angel fire lighting the eyes of those staring back at him.

It was a family who loved him.A family who mourned with him and for him, a family who fought for him.

A family who would die for him.

The sharptsssof a beer can tab popping open broke the spell over the assembled party.Iron stood behind Rhode and held the beer out to him.Rhode accepted it but not before the giant angel’s smile lifted the corners of his russet beard.

The grin was equal parts mirth and menace, relief over a bridge finally crossed and a new leg of the race to head into.

Iron clapped Rhode on the shoulder.“Let’s do this, brother.”

Chapter28

The next week was a furor of logistics, location scouting, way too much time underground, and nowhere near enough time under Neela’s soul bond.

It turned out that busting the seal on Rhode’s painandhis full power made for a rather ravenous angel.

But like a girl was about to complain?It was, not so ironically, absolute heaven.

Everyone’s safety concerns over Cyro’s next move had hit Mach 3 levels of unease since Neela was known to be with the angels.One of the armories, because of course there were several, had quickly been turned into more of what she would deem a proper war room, save for the espresso machine, which was, in the end, regrettably relocated.But as Rhode explained, close proximity to their weapons cache allowed for proper examination of next steps.Thanks to what Rhode was finally able to share with everyone, amendments to the angels’ tactical and mechanical approaches had become more important than ever.

Cyro was ready to deploy magic that could not only destroy the sentinels’ metals on contact during any combat mission but, if the charmers ever managed to examine Rhode’s DNA for the right markers, may have found ways to create their own magic-resistant metal and use it against the angels.

There was no shortage of possibilities scrutinized when it came to what Cyro might do, and every night when Rhode dragged his exhausted body back to bed, he’d regale Neela with another weapon the angels hadn’t considered Cyro capable of, as well as which weapons of theirs would serve best in which scenarios.Closely wielded blades, long-range firearms, angel fire, shields, flight attacks—not a single option was left unexplored.He, along with every other angel in the den, had taken to walking around like the celestial equivalent of caffeinated zombies.There wasn’t a single hard-set jaw among them that hadn’t displayed signs of twitching, whether from stress, lack of sleep, or Iron pulling unhealthy amounts of doppio espresso shots and passing them out like Halloween candy.

Amid all the chaos of trying to plot out Cyro’s next move and after the consensus seemed to favor Neela staying in the den since she was being actively hunted, she’d made some discoveries of her own.

The first: she missed the sunlight desperately.

The second: she was in deeper trouble than she realized when it came to Rhode.

All those self-proclamations and pep talks about keeping her emotional distance from the angel went right out the proverbial window when he joined her in bed each night.It was like every ounce of mental energy had been so completely sucked dry from the man that by the time he left the others, his physical needs had been so far neglected to the point of starvation.

They exchanged very few words when he came to her.Didn’t need to, really.There were so many ways to care for someone, yet so few of them that required connection without speaking, fulfillment without asking, satisfaction without regret or concern.

After the first night she stayed in his room, he’d petitioned Iron to equip his space with comforts for her.Computers, gaming consoles, headphones, microphones, whatever she described when he asked after what her former quarters had looked like, what she had missed most.Soon, the barren space had taken on a new life with the simple additions of color-changing string lights, an Internet connection she almost—almost—got down on her knees to worship, and the largest pink-leafed aglaonema she’d ever seen.

But it was the unknown comfort of hearing that door close each night and having his hands seek her out before anything else that settled a soothing calmness into spaces she didn’t know could be reached.The angel had a knack for hunting down her tension and obliterating it into pieces too small to ever find their way back together.

Most nights, he’d find her at the desk he had set up.The workspace was one of those electric numbers, with programmable buttons that could adjust the height of the desk should she need to stand and stretch during one of her games.Always, he started with her headphones, peeling them over the back of her head and gently lifting the weight of her hair off her shoulders before dropping a kiss on the tattoo behind her ear that only he could see.Then he’d flip off the camera, which she had taken to having on for certain games, but never the microphone.

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