Page 61 of The Surrender

Bringing my knees up to my chest, huddling into myself to protect my heart, I turn my neck and study him from the corner of my eye. “It was her dress, wasn’t it?”

He pauses. I don’t cow under those deep-smoke eyes narrowing upon my figure. How he studies me as if he’s looking right past me and…imagining her in my place. But all he can manifest is a ghost.

I am nothing like her.

Bristling, he tightens the muscles in his wings, pulsing more blood through the veins. “It’s fitting for this night. The Lord of the Court of Storms took someone I loved. He will bear witness as I take his.”

My throat strangles itself. No sob can push through. Incensed tears do instead, and I swipe at them as they burn my eyes.

“What was Kyan supposed to do?” I stab my words at him, thrusting out my chest. “Let Erya kill him?”

“Yes.”

The lone word echoes in the cavern, thundering off the walls and causing the little bones to tremble. I hug myself tighter and press my lips into a hard line.

His shadow falls over me again. As much as I want to grab one of these bones and plunge it into his chest, I know better than to contend with a demon. If I didn’t have a baby in me, then maybe, but I touch the swell of my belly and wince. My arms ache as I remember holding little Sylie and wonder if I will ever wrap mine around my child. Or if that dream dies here.

Shrinking and curling into myself, I avoid the sight of the baby bones around me, those little skulls.

Nuriel would have no qualms about ripping me to pieces and feasting on my unborn child.

“I wasn’t always like this,” he breaks the silence, the voice softening to a dark velvet.

I should plug my ears. I should hum to cover up his voice and just keep rocking. But my curiosity gets the better of me. A subtle tingling at the back of my neck.

In my peripheral vision, he shifts, wings no longer eclipsing me. At first glance, it seemed like veins had covered his wings like the root paths of a tree. Now, I make out the subtle difference between veins and what I believed were veins. Blood does not pulse through them, and the knowledge cuts deep into me like a thousand needles.

They are scars.

With his hands cupping his elbows, Nuriel paces again. His jaw is set, but the muscles around his eyes have softened, turning the gray into a delicate, broken fog. My shoulders lift ever so little because I recognize the deeper layers in those eyes. They bear their own scars.

“Erya and I were the most powerful seraphs in the Ten Unified Cities who served under Lord Kyanatu,” he says.

He doesn’t release his hands from his elbows. Emotion I don’t quite recognize ripples across me. Is he holding himself together, too?

“When Kronos swept across the lands like a plague to conquer everything, we were the first to align with our King, our god.” A frown curls the corners of his mouth down, setting a sharper tone for his story. “Kronos knew this, so he targeted us first.”

He turns to me. The inside of my chest throbs at the storm of shadows around his eyes. Those scars along his wings seem to open and bleed with every word he speaks.

“He took your soul?” I wonder softly.

His eyes flared. “Erya’s. He took my mate’s soul.”

Dread infects my stomach, swirling more nausea to the surface, but I focus on his sharp eyes as they try to pierce my heart.

“Do you know what happens to an angel when his or her soul is stripped from them?” He pauses only to let the question impregnate the silence before he flexes his wings and continues, “It is the deepest pain and torture for our race. We lose our wings. We are grounded. No grounded angel can live in our realms. Kronos exiled Erya to a life of tribulation, isolation, and desolation. She was an example of what could happen to others. The Court of Storms was the other reminder.”

Breaths falter in my chest, lost in my lungs squeezing too much. “What do you mean?”

“Erya was given no choice. Those who chose to align with Kyan were banished with him. No, he did not take their souls. But he exiled them to the Waste and reduced them to shells of their former selves. Malformations. Monstrosities of the lowest and cheapest comparisons of our kind.”

“Birds,” I echo quietly in the cavern. More tears cut through my eyes as I touch a little bone.

“Some with feathers, some with wings. But none may ever fly.” He clears his throat and gets on with his pacing. “Erya could not fly. I sought her. I left the boundaries of our realm and searched for her. But she was not the Erya I knew. Without her soul, her heart had grown dark.

“When I found her, she was cold and sharp as winter thorns. Her wings long-since withered. But she was still a fallen seraph, and it made her beautiful beyond compare. So, she walked the streets of other kingdoms. The prized whore of the realms.”

His dark brows pull together. Shudders travel up my spine because...I know what it feels like to be treated like a whore. The gray whore of the Borderlands. Silence is painful. It stitches the moments between us, and I feel them like a needle pushing into flesh to seal the gap of questions. Broken pieces coming together.

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