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“When you say she, you mean . . .”
“Ragana. She’s the one spoiling your fish and poisoning your customers. She’s the one who can freeze water with a thought and destroy the earth’s and ocean’s bounty with a breath.”
Any other evening, Molly would have tipped her hat to the crazy man spinning tall tales and run screaming in the other direction. Any other evening, she would have thought angels were nothing more than Christmas tree toppers and her restaurant had been experiencing a sky-high amount of totally unrelated tummy-troubled customers.
Except she and Benny had inspected her walk-in fridges half a dozen times in the past few days and found nothing. The health inspector had found nothing.
And Brass . . . he was definitely not nothing. As frazzled as her mind was, there was no explaining away his wings or his armor. For as long as she lived, she didn’t think she could ever erase the image of him kneeling in her restaurant’s kitchen, a golden-yellow god armored head to toe, with metal wings both fabled and ferocious. He had been terrifying on the inhale and glorious on the exhale, and with his silent stoicism and flaming gaze that touched every part of her, he’d heartily stolen all her breaths since.
He was real, all right. Her heart knew it, and most convincingly of all, her damn body knew it, too. Was it so hard to believe, then, that an ancient goddess could exist as well?
“Why?” Molly asked. “Why is she targeting me?”
An animalistic answering noise rent from deep in Brass’s chest. “Because you are important to me, and she fucking knows it. Because she wants me to know she can take you away from me at any time.”
Then the fire in his eyes snuffed out, revealing those whiskey amber pools again that screamed out a wild and raging sadness.
“Because I’m not ill, Molly. I’m cursed—cursed by her. And come the winter solstice, I’ll cease to be who I am, what I am.” He hissed in a deep breath and grabbed both her hands in his. “You’re the key to breaking my curse. I’ve known it since I felt you through your apartment window that first time we were patrolling the grounds and I had the good sense to look up. I’ve known it since I relieved you from carrying a Dutch oven when we helped Drea move and you rewarded me by running away.” His words came faster now, more frantic. “I’ve known it since I ripped that Help Wanted sign from your window and kissed you not nearly fucking enough.” He squeezed her hands tighter, pressing a foreboding sense of urgency into them.
“And now, she knows it, too.”
Chapter 23
It had been so long since Brass had spoken that bitch’s name, he was surprised his mouth could still form the word without spitting. He’d thought it would have brought him some small measure of relief to at least share that truth with Molly. Instead, he wished he could take it all back, that Molly’s alluring and attentive gaze hadn’t dimmed to the degree it had when he’d dumped the first of many sinful confessions at her feet.
Of course she would have questions. Her brilliant mind was a treasure the mortal world had no hope of learning how to appreciate. With all that inquisitiveness trained on him, however, a familiar sickening emotion returned to the pit of his stomach.
Fear.
And this time, none of his usual coping mechanisms were available. His brothers usually frowned upon weapons training or hand-to-hand fighting anywhere other than the armory or the sparring ring. Tung would kill him ten times over if any of the books saw a speck of dust, let alone damage.
Which meant he had no choice but to face Molly’s inevitable line of questioning . . . and endure her wrath when he couldn’t answer her.
“You’re cursed?” she asked. “How?”
And so it begins.
“Do you recall when I told you about my ailment?”
Her eyes flitted through her memories before alighting on the one in question. “You called it a brain condition. A limiting ailment that, when it flares up, affects you physically and also your personality. You said it makes you . . . feral. When I asked whether it was fatal, you fed me some arrogant bullshit about everything being fatal eventually.”
“That’s all true.” He lifted his gaze, then, and his lips curled into a small smile. “Including the bit about my arrogance.”
That line of cheekiness earned him a snort and an eye roll.
“As for whether it will kill me . . .” Brass shrugged and rubbed a thumb across her knuckles, loving the way her skin was always just as warm as his. Another thing he’d miss.
“I won’t know who I am any longer,” he continued. “There is a fury inside of all of us, a necessary rage for any sentinel to dispatch who we must. It’s tempered by our celestial power. Rage and right have always been in balance. It was how the prime mages created us. But my rage has been trapped within my soul for almost two thousand years. When the winter solstice arrives, my full fury will finally be unleashed, overcoming my celestial power and trapping it within the vacated cage that once held its oppressor. Without that balance, I’ll go mad. It’s . . . it’s a blind madness. I won’t recognize myself, my brothers, you, anyone. There would no longer be any humanity left in me. I’d become a mindless animal hell-bent on little more than destroying any living thing that crosses my path.”
Molly shook her head in disbelief. “That’s not possible. How is any of that possible?” Then her shoulders stiffened, as if settling on a solution. “No, that’s not happening. I’ve had to come to terms with a lot of strange stuff over the last several hours, but that I refuse to allow.”
The indignation in her voice on his behalf would have been heartwarming if it wasn’t so heartbreaking. She spoke her declaration with enough assurance to chase away any lingering doubt, as if she were some wayward traveler who knew all she had to do to correct her course was ask for directions and that would solve everything. It was the tone of a woman dominating a male-dominated profession who regularly dealt with entirely too much bullshit before breakfast and was no longer interested in hearing any of the lunchtime specials.
Brass shifted his weight and smiled sadly. Her gumption was one of the most captivating—and arousing—things about her. Damn, he was going to miss that, too.
“How did this happen?” she asked again with a quieter desperation.
Brass sank back into the couch and let the weight of the cushions support more than their fair share of his burden. “Around the turn of the last century, I was in the Baltics hunting an apex charmer who had just raided a nearby village for souls.”
