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The idea punched a hole through her chest and robbed her of the remaining air in her lungs. How could he be sick? He was so vital, so stunning and captivating, so . . .
Kind.
With him, it was the sort of silent kindness whose ripples were felt far more deeply than the initial impact. It was quiet and needed and just . . . there.
“Is it fatal?” she breathed out, hating the desperation with which she demanded to know the answer.
Another slow exhale. “Everything is fatal eventually.”
“That’s a bullshit thing to say and you know it.”
Then he lifted solemn eyes to her. “It’s the truth. And, yes, sometimes the truth can be bullshit.”
That statement sank into her throat, walling off any emotion that threatened to erupt from her.
Why? How? What can I do? How much time?
She’d been around the man for a total of thirty-six hours, but he’d lurked in her mind for months, wriggling in like an earworm, both adding to her discomfort and easing it. This left her with no shortage of strange emotions to sort through when emotional analysis was the last thing afforded to her by her shitty circumstances.
Molly’s mind whirled with so many damn questions. Instead of interrogating him with the ones burning on the tip of her tongue, however, she merely asked, “What happens to you, exactly, when you get a flare-up?”
“I am not . . . myself,” he clarified cautiously, looking away. “When the attacks come, the logical brain activity is suppressed, so to speak. My fight or flight response is often triggered, except it’s usually stuck on the fight setting. I turn almost feral, you could say, not so different from a beast that should be put down.”
“You’re not a beast,” she rushed out. Oh, screw it. She grabbed up his hand anyway, knowing full well the contact was probably more for her benefit than his. To her surprise, he didn’t recoil. Her heart did a tremulous flip for every second their skin remained connected, and then another when his rough fingers squeezed hers with a firmness that belied the grim subject she suspected taxed him more than he wanted her to know.
She was, however, expecting him to pull away, so much so that she was already counting down the seconds until his touch left hers and took his warmth with it.
Instead, he surprised the ever-loving crap out of her and lifted her knuckles to his mouth. The kiss that brushed the back of her hand was nothing more than a soft press of lips. Combine that with the reverent close of his eyes that lasted a hair too long to be considered an involuntary blink and Molly’s mind was whirling like a field of dandelion fluff kicked up by a thousand prancing fawns, along with other long-neglected parts of her.
Holy buttered biscuits.
Before she could think to do or say anything, Brass blessedly saved her from having to form words and lowered her hand back to the bed. Lowered but never released. “That’s not the first time I’ve been told that, but it’s perhaps the first time I’ve ever dared to believe it.”
“Why?” She didn’t even try keeping the shock out of her voice. He may have deserved many things, but something told her that her artifice wasn’t one of them.
Then he lifted pained eyes to hers, and a heated tremor slunk down her spine. “Because you were the one to say it.”
Chapter 14
What the hell was it about this woman that had Brass scooping out all his secrets and serving them up for her brutal inspection? And to his increasingly infuriating astonishment, he had no desire to call the words back. He wanted her to see the hollowness, the scored and scratched shell that he’d wrapped around himself with bitter efficiency for two millennia. One look into the chocolate depths of Molly’s eyes and he’d been speared through with something he hadn’t ever gotten from his brothers.
Understanding.
Brass tried to blink through what he was seeing, so uncertain as he was to not see the usual suspects casting their shadows upon him: pity, fear, foolhardy determination. Those were the typical troika that made up the other sentinels’ concerns as time stretched on without the benefit of progress. Despite being in the whole avenging angel business, hope was not the currency of the higher realms like the mortals liked to imagine it was.
Oh, no. In Brass’s intimate experience, hope was—and he meant this in every sense of the word—a bitch.
Yet damn it all to hell if he didn’t allow himself to hang on to Molly’s slender hand and pretend, just for a moment, that his most hated four-letter word held out enough of its purported grace to shine some of that shit down on him.
He squeezed her hand tighter and resisted the urge to cradle it against his beating heart. The warmth of her skin still tingled against his lips, and it was all he could do not to hoard other parts of her into his senses like some greedy dragon protecting its treasure. Mages, her touch was exquisite and utterly devastating. Just the single singe of contact was enough to calm any loosening threads that had unraveled around his rage. The simple press of her slight fingers against his beat back the creature and freed his fire to rise just below the surface where it was most comfortable.
Comfort. Fuck, it had been so damn long . . .
“Is your family supportive?” Molly’s question broke through the haze of his euphoria, grounding him to the anchor of her words.
“Yes,” he offered, unsure how to proceed with what he could reveal. When Drea soul bonded with Chrome, they’d all agreed that the supernatural elements of their lives should be kept from mortals for the humans’ safety. Drea, after all, had already learned that terrible truth herself, being born a messenger mage in the Empyrean, only to have been trapped outside of heaven’s gates when Brass and the other sentinels enacted the Sealing, a last-ditch effort to prevent Cyro’s advancing demon armies from storming and destroying the Empyrean. Drea’s fall to the mortal realm had resulted in memory loss, reincarnation, and a murderous human ex-boyfriend who’d been manipulated by the demon leader to try and create a fallen angel army of his own.
Drea’s friendship with Molly had been the only thing that was real and worth saving, but to do so meant keeping Molly in the dark about their true nature.
