Page 8 of Devoted

“Fuck off,” I pulled the bag away from Nate’s wandering hand and glowered at him. “They’re mine. Don’t make me cut off your fingers. They take forever to regrow.”

I would too. The lessons my father had taught me had been, unfortunately, too deeply ingrained to ignore. I might’ve been in a better mood if this meeting had got underway on time, but that rarely happened with this lot.

“He’s very protective of his sweets.” Rami smirked at me across the conference table. “Won’t share them with anyone.”

I bared my teeth at him. Rami might have been the one I was closest to, but all that meant was that he knew how to wind me up better than anyone else. “Buy your fucking own.”

Rami opened his mouth, no doubt to argue back, but Micah chose that moment to enter the room. With our leader now present, it was time to get down to business.

Like most people, I found meetings to be the bane of my fucking life. Hours upon hours spent dissecting bullshit thatdefinitelycould’ve been an email.

To make matters worse, not a single person around this conference table was a human. This meant that not only did we have the standard arguments and tedious interruptions to deal with, we also had the added bonus of supernatural egos to contend with.

We were angels, but our behaviour was far from angelic.

I tried to pay attention to the discussion happening around me, but it was hard. Our exchange from last night was playing on my mind.

“I haven’t scared you off then?”

“Impossible.”

Sam thought that now, but if he knew the reality of exactly who he was talking to…?

He’d run a mile.

It wasn’t just that I was an angel, but that I was a soldier. One who was often sent all over the world to deal with supernatural bullshit. Even that might not be a dealbreaker, but add in my less-than-sunny personality?

It wasn’t a package anyone wanted to take on.

On top of all that, we weren’t free to choose who we fell in love with. Angels, like demons, had fated mates. Most of the time, that worked out in your favour. You found your mate, fell in love, and lived happily ever after.

But if you gave your heart to someone who wasn’t destined to be yours?

That would end in disaster.

I wasn’t even surewhyI was still talking to Sam. It wasn’t like it’d ever lead anywhere…but for some reason, I couldn’t resist. My whole mood now seemed to hinge on whether or not he was online.

Even now, when my attention should have been on other matters, I was struggling to not think about him. My phone was burning a hole in my pocket, begging me to check it.

You’ve got your watch on. It’ll notify you if he comes online.

Did I buy a smart watch simply for that reason? If I did, I’d never tell. That would be absurd. Obsessive.

And true.

Knowing I’d get a notification didn’t help my mood. Mind you, very little did. I think I was born grumpy, and it had just grown worse with each passing century.

That wasn’t accurate. My attitude had changed the day my father finally won.

Everything had changed after that.

It didn’t help that my day job mainly consisted of admin. People might imagine that being an angelic soldier equalled epic battles mixed in with secretive espionage, but the mundane truth was far from that. Sure, those things happened occasionally, but most of what we did was this: Have pointless meetings. Fill out endless reports and paperwork. Play diplomat between warring factions.

The meetings though, they were the worst. If it had been up to me, they’d have been banned entirely. I suspected Micah, the leader of the Seraphim, felt the same. Unfortunately, as the most elite unit of soldiers, there were certain protocols we had to follow.

Given recent events, we were all feeling…reticent about following orders from upstairs.

For centuries, we’d toed the line. Okay, so we’d occasionally nudged over it by involving ourselves in situations we shouldn’t have, but generally we’d done as we’d been told. But when Heaven had tried to come between Micah and his fated mate, we’d refused to allow it. As one, we’d backed our leader and his mate, prepared to pay with our immortality if need be.

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