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Fucking lucky. If only all tantrums were so easily tolerated.
The park bench he warmed had been his permanent late-afternoon perch since Molly had not only dressed him down but castrated and condemned him. The worn wood had long since lost the warmth of her when he’d kissed her there last, though his senses still sought it out regardless.
All because he couldn’t fucking say what Molly had needed to hear. A thousand times since that night, he’d stayed awake replaying the battle in his mind. Not the battle against Ragana but the one against his heart. He’d always chosen his words carefully and had long since learned that it was better not to say anything than to say the wrong thing. Would it have helped her to know that, yes, he knew she had magic but it terrified him? Did she not see the havoc magic had wreaked on his life already? Magic wielded at the hands of a woman?
A woman who was not your soul bond. A woman who perpetuated far more crimes against you than the one whose only crime was giving you your life back.
Brass crunched his boot down on a clump of ice, then growled when the block shattered all too quickly.
Damn, he needed to break something. To throw himself into the sea, to have the frigid ocean batter his flesh until he could no longer feel the hollowness that had been left behind these past three weeks. He needed to?—
“You know, the sun will set whether you’re there to watch it or not.” Rhode’s approaching voice did more to scratch at Brass’s wounds than soothe them.
“Are you the babysitter du jour, then?” Brass inquired over his shoulder. “Who drove you?” As sour as he was, he knew better than to highlight the fact that since Rhode had been returned to them, he had not yet been able to call forth his wings.
Rhode settled his weight onto the bench. “I drove myself.”
Brass lifted an eyebrow.
“Oh, don’t act so surprised. I’ve been driving for over a month. You’d know that if you bothered to spend time with anything other than your bad mood.”
“I am not in the?—”
“Mood? Yes. I just established that. Mages, man. Did the woman rob you of your memory in addition to your good sense?”
“What do you want, Rhode? I’m tired.”
The angel’s heated umber gaze raked over Brass’s profile in silent challenge, but Brass kept his eyes trained on the horizon. On the extremely short list of things he wanted to do that day, getting into it with Rhode wasn’t one of them. Besides, the sun would settle soon, taking the day and his connection to Molly along with it.
“I realize it is ironic for one lost angel to provide guidance to another lost angel, and yet here we are.”
Brass’s spine tensed at the allusion. It wasn’t lost on him how significant such a statement was. Ever since Rhode’s captivity, the angel’s secrets have been his own. Often, he’d blame his silence on tampered memories, but Brass hadn’t endured two thousand years of torment not to recognize it in another’s eyes.
“I don’t need sympathy,” Brass remarked, keeping his suspicions to himself.
“Good, ‘cause you’ll not get it. Least of all from me.”
“For fuck’s sake, speak plainly.”
Rhode cast him a droll look and crossed his ankle over his knee with a casual grace Brass had always envied. “You’re lost, brother. You need a map.”
“A map,” he parroted, letting his disbelief linger on the P.
“Yes, a map. How are you expected to see the way forward without guidance? You’ve been sent astray for two thousand years, Brass. As I’ve been made to understand, you’ve been here but not really. Alive but barely. Of course it’s impossible to see the next move when, until now, every road available to you has been paved with booby traps. Terrible phrase, that,” he muttered under his breath. Then he leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, adopting the same frustrated sitting stance as Brass. “But even the most intrepid mortal explorers found ways to push through.”
Push through? Was he serious?
“I cannot simply push through,” Brass snapped, then swept a hand out in front of him. “There is no navigating this for me. Molly won’t speak to me. She won’t even look at me, and I refuse to dishonor her further by forcing her to hear explanations on why she should forgive another man in a long line of men who have betrayed her.”
He heaved out lungfuls of an emptiness he couldn’t escape, knowing that a darker fear always rushed in on the heels of his laden breath. One he’d never given a voice to . . . until now.
“But she’s my soul bond! The one creature in this existence who carries the light of the Eternal Flame within her soul, which has, against all odds, found my own light’s spark. And she has magic!” He dropped his head into his palms. “Do you see? Do you see why, after all I have endured, the idea of being that close, that vulnerable, with a woman who possesses magic has me clawing for a way out?”
There it was. The pin in the grenade that he couldn’t stop fiddling with. With Molly at arm’s length and her magic kept at a distance, it didn’t matter how her true motivations would manifest over time, because he ensured she’d made a decision that was for the best.
Even if the grenade did go off, he’d be free of the blast zone.
Eternally miserable but free.
