Page 5 of Love's Ace

“Get off him.” Apparently, Ty didn’t want to help me anymore. That was fine. I could rip the red line from either of them. I turned and my hand shot out—it slapped against his chest and tore another scream from me when I realized the thread felt like acid on my skin.

I could take that pain.

I could take any pain if it would stop the light—the fire.

My fist tightened, and Ty’s eyes flared wide as his breath caught in his chest. When I jerked, he almost collapsed. His lashes fluttered like he was going to lose consciousness… and then someone wrapped their arms around me and tried to pull me away.

His lover.

Alex.

But now that I had hold of the line, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to let go. Nothing was going to make me let it go.

I was going to shred it. Destroy it. I was going to—

Confusion tore through me as a bright, white light burst from my shoulder. The pain was dull compared to the inferno in my chest, but it hurt.

Fuck, ithurt.

I let go of the red line and tried to tear the light from my chest—it looked like anarrow—and my body slowly turned in the direction it came from while I sliced my palms open in my frenzy to remove it.

In my confusion, I was too slow. Strong hands wrapped around my shoulder and flung me down the alleyway with a strength that shouldn’t have been possible.

Then again, arrows made of white light and lines made of crimson running between two men shouldn’t have been possible either, so…

I lifted my eyes, and even though I could still see the halo of the red line burning bright behind my attacker, I felt blinded in a whole new way. The man in front of me was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. He was smaller than me, but he seemed to make up for it with lean muscles and compact strength. His chest and arms were littered with black tattoos, and his eyes were an impossible shade of purple… but I barely saw any of it. I was consumed by the sight behind him.

Spreading out like they wanted to touch the heavens was a pair of gorgeous black wings, darker than the surrounding night, looking softer than the velvet sky.

Impossible.

Impossible.

Impossibly beautiful.

The word was starting to lose meaning with how much I’d thought it, and my mind was losing its grasp on logic. My body was still burning, and I couldn’t stop myself when I screamed again, because the two men—and the red line that trailed between them that seemed to haunt my very existence—were scrambling away.

I snarled and lunged forward, but my beautiful attacker let out a sharp laugh and caught me by the arrow in my shoulder,wrenching it and making me gag from the sensation and stumble into him.

As soon as I did, somethingmoreimpossible happened.

The pain gave way for a moment to… relief.

For just a second, the fire in my chest stopped burning, and I drew in a breath that tasted like cold, wet air. Tears sprang into my eyes and I gasped, drawing in as much of that chill as I could while trying to get back to logical thought.

The world was bliss and silence and the gentle fall of rain… The world was the intake of his breath and the sound of his heartbeat that I could hear thrumming in my ears… It was the subtle shift of his feathers as his wings rustled behind him.

And then everything was roaring back to heat, a blazing inferno that sent streaks of agony rocketing through my body and threatened to tear my chest open. He pushed me away from him, further into the alley.

Hedidthis.

My entire body surged with a hatred I’d never felt before, a fury I couldn’t begin to understand.

He’d taken the pain away just to bring it back, and now it wasworse.

Worse, because I knew what he felt like.Worse, because he felt like heaven.

And now I was in hell.

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