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Those massive wings curled back behind Brass’s shoulders, and he stood to a height that not only looked menacing but miraculous. Every single bit of skin and sinew glowed with a pristine metallic opulence that only bronze sculptors could hope to capture. But the features were there all the same, and she panically sought out every familiar frown line and furrow until her mind was absolutely fucking sure it was the same man in front of her she’d left there a moment ago.
Except with wings . . .
And the same glowing ochre eyes she hadn’t been able to get out of her head for the past five days.
Hours later, Molly sat at one of the tables in the restaurant’s dining room and accepted her second can of nitro cold brew from Drea courtesy of Chrome’s private stash.
As it turned out, Chrome wasn’t just Drea’s boyfriend but her mate. Oh, and he and his brothers were angels, as in wing-wielding flyover feather boys, except with metallic powers and fire and stuff.
Angels. Brass was a freaking angel?
“I know it’s a lot to process,” Drea lamented, pulling out the chair next to Molly and sliding over a napkin-turned-coaster.
“No, itemized deductions on your tax return are a lot to process. Municipal permit applications are a lot to process. This”—Molly swung an arm around the room, encompassing the four angels gathered there— “is fiction. None of this is real. My brain just hasn’t figured out a way to explain it all yet. But trust me, there’ll be a way. There’s always an explanation.”
Drea smiled softly and didn’t bother to keep the pity out of her amethyst eyes. “Is there? Or are you just still angry at me?”
Oh, Molly was angry all right, if anyone would call it anger when her best friend, who was also not entirely mortal, didn’t fess up to dating—sorry, mating—a fallen angel, then, yeah, she was still angry.
In the corner of the dining room, Bronze and Chrome were huddled together with another man, one with golden hair just past his chin, who’d been introduced to her as Tungsten. Though just as deep-chested and imposing as Chrome, he had an air about him that suggested his strength came from sources other than physical demands. The lines crinkling the corners of his eyes told her he laughed easily and often, but his attentive expressions were ones she’d only seen on men who valued insight and advice over barking orders.
True to form, Brass wasn’t among them. Instead, he stayed hunkered down in the kitchen, giving some excuse about inspecting the rest of the plumbing.
Guess the best way to avoid the elephant in the room is for the elephant to avoid the room altogether.
Tungsten, whom everyone called Tung, finished his quiet conversation with the others and grabbed the vacant seat opposite Molly. His smile was a kind condolence, obviously meant to smooth over the hard parts of a very jarring realization. It stung more than soothed, however, because all she wanted was to see that same smile on someone else’s face.
Someone who, once a-fucking-gain, was avoiding her like he hadn’t just saved her from partial-thickness burns and prevented her restaurant from a months-long HVAC-and-water-related shutdown.
“I’m sure you must have many questions about what you’ve learned,” Tung offered by way of an icebreaker.
She was silent for a moment, fiddling with her coffee can and scanning the nutrition information for the fifth time. When her thoughts became too oppressive to bear, she mumbled, “It really is all true, isn’t it?”
Two sets of sad eyes confirmed the answer to her first question, and all she could do was shake her head in disbelief.
Angels were real. Brass and his brothers were honest-to-God fallen angels, had all hailed from somewhere called the Empyrean, and were trapped in the mortal realm, fighting legit demons—no, charmers, they were called—and searching for sparks of an Eternal Flame that could get them all back home.
Drea, her best friend on the planet, was mated. Soul bound to a fallen angel. She wasn’t even human.
Just like Brass wasn’t even human. Not only was he not human but he was immortal.
It was more than a lot to wrap her head around, especially after the day she’d had.
Tung was right. Molly had a litany of questions piling up, but after a kitchen full of water droplets she had no hope of finding before they inevitably turned into doors-closing mold and her second can of Chrome’s consumable rocket fuel, there was only so much of her energy left for interrogations. So, she offered up the one question she could still bring herself to ask, the one that had never stopped plaguing her.
“Why?”
Tung sat back. “Why, what?”
“Why did this happen?”
Drea leaned forward and gripped Molly’s hand. “Oh, honey, Brass and the others are trying to figure that out right now. Though, there is a working theory that it might not have been?—”
“No, I mean, why did this happen to me?”
Drea looked to Tung briefly, but Molly didn’t have the energy to try and read what passed between them, so she let every pent-up worry tumble out of her and land where they may. The floors were already a mess anyway. No harm adding to it at that point.
“Every time I try to seize an opportunity, or a little bit of good decides to come my way, some monster-truck-sized slice of shit comes to steamroll me as if the luck granted to me was a mistake to begin with. My best friend is some sort of celestial messenger, I’ve had fallen freaking angels cleaning up spilled juice and schlepping garbage out to the dumpster, my customers are being poisoned, some dice-throwing retirees are gunning for me to close up shop because they don’t like my tacos, and now my building’s pipes decide to?—”
