Page 72 of Angel's Vengeance

“I care that she’s well.That’s all,” he said, schooling the emotion from his features.

The large angel folded his arms over his chest and stared at him blandly.“Bullshit.You’re more butthurt over how she ripped the Band-Aid off, rather than why she might have had it on in the first place.”

“Escape and evade, Iron.That’s what she was about.The rest of it is just a bunch of pretty pictures.Lies.More smoke and mirrors.”Neela had proven as much when she’d flung out that sad sack story about wanting to escape with him.

And the worst part of it all was that he’d wanted to believe her, as ludicrous as it sounded.But no matter how many times he tried to picture his steel-backed soul bond sneaking through Cyro’s compound to try and save them both from what was coming for them, another image weighed equally hot and heavy in his mind.

One of Neela telling Cyro exactly what he wanted to hear to save herself.

Which was the lie?

Rhode waved the image away.“Look, I appreciate the welfare check, but I prefer to be alone—Oomph!”Hard-packed snow found its way into every orifice responsible for getting oxygen to the more vital parts of him.Shaking his head and spitting out the cold stuff, he turned, nostrils flaring, only to lunge behind the dying oak when a snowball the size of a small watermelon careened toward him.“What the fuck, Chrome?”he yelled, peeking his head around the trunk.

But the angel was already bending down, grunting beneath the weight of—goddammit—anothersnowball.Or to be more accurate, a snow boulder.

“You keep saying stupid and hypocritical shit, I’ma keep heaving this white stuff at you with the goal of eventually packing in your backward brain with so much cold that it has no choice but to shut down the hysterics and see things through the eyes of survival.”

“Avoiding you twoissurvival!”Rhode threw himself behind the oak again when Iron double-fisted two snowpacks and sent them flying at his head.Wonderful.Despite the worst of the snow hitting the tree, there was still plenty of impact to make him grunt and cause his back teeth to clench.When it was clear those two had no intention of giving up, Rhode threw his hands up and spit out words of surrender.“All right already.Enough!I get it, okay?I get it.”

When Rhode finally came out from behind the tree, arms behind his head like some hostage, it was to the soured and thoroughly pissed-off expressions of two sentinels who clearly would have had no problem burying him beneath the snow just so they could come out on top.

Mages, he was so tired of this.Tired of questioning everyone’s intentions, including his own.For once in his life, he’d happily carve out key organs just to be told the truth without coercion or tricks.

What a lousy spy he’d become, expecting the truth so easily from others while being too exhausted to serve it up himself.Irony was the karmic bitter pill that was constantly getting shoved down his throat, and he’d never quite developed a taste for the stuff.

Rhode wasn’t entirely surprised that Chrome was the first to step forward, hands blessedly empty of snowballs, thank the mages.

“Since we’re on the subject of survival, let’s pick at that scab for a bit.Here’s a newsflash for ya: youcan’tsurvive without your soul bond.Period.End of story.”Then the angel jabbed a blunt finger at Rhode’s chest.“You, more than anyone, know how important secrets are to survival.I wouldn’t have branded you as my seraphim commander if you didn’t know that truth.”

Iron cracked a jaw and grunted his agreement.“And if it wasn’t for you and your secrets, Rhode, Chrome might not be here.Hell, none of us might even be here if you’d been one breath weaker.”Dark sincerity floated in the shadows of the sentinel’s mismatched eyes, conjuring up memories and alternatives none of them wanted to contemplate.“But you weren’t.And neither was Neela.”

Aaand there they were again.Back at the beginning of the very ride that had made him so goddamn nauseous that it’d seemed safer to stick to the carnival games than to go anywhere near the subject and admit how chickenshit he was.

But coward or no, some things still hadn’t changed.

“She lied to me.”

“To save herself.To saveyou,” Chrome pointed out.

“But that’s just it.I have no idea what’s truth or fiction.Do I believe that Cyro’s own get had a plan to rescue me all along?That she merely got caught andthatwas why I had to face the consequences of her farce-turned-reality?Or was it all part of a plan to finally win favor in the eyes of the one being who never returned it?For weeks, I have come here and spun all sorts of stories and scenarios of what could have been, what she may have known and when.The web of my mind is so tangled with possibilities, and to hear more lies from her would completely?—”

“Does it matter?”Iron asked, serious as a heart attack.

The gears in Rhode’s mind ground to a halt, because in no way had the angel just asked that question.“Does.It.Matter?How the hell can you even ask me that?”

“How the hell did any of us get to a point where you’d make me ask it?”

At a loss for sense and next steps that didn’t involve stabbing his kama into Iron’s ear canal, all he could do was shake his head in disbelief.

“Let me clarify things, because, for the most part, we can give you the benefit of the doubt as to why you don’t have your head screwed on straight.But the statute of limitations on said benefit expired, oh, I don’t know, the minute your soul bond said she was about to sign a lease on an apartment that had nothing to do with you.”

“Careful,” Rhode ground out.

“We’ve all had secrets,” Iron said, impressing upon him the full weight of Rhode’s position.“Thewhyof them was never as important as the execution, because at the end of the day, we always trusted each other and knew that whatever words we had to say were always said in service of the Empyrean.What came out of our mouths didn’t matter.Betrayal doesn’t come from words.It comes from actions.So I’ll ask you again, does anything Neela said when Cyro’s blade was at her throat actually fucking matter?”

Rhode’s chest pumped air through his lungs at jet-engine speeds.For the first time in too many weeks, he sifted through memories, not of that snowy evening at the park but of every other moment he’d shared with Neela.The day he found her, tangled and frantic beneath a charmer’s cargo net.The evening she foundhimat the animal shelter and took exactly zero of his brooding bullshit.The intoxicating joy on her face as she flitted from tree to tree in this very arboretum.

The photo booth where all she wanted was a memento to take home, and she gave him one his mouth had since memorized.

---