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Girl was as ferocious and determined as a honey badger but had a paltry amount of experience exerting her dominance when she was bone tired. Who could blame her?
“Right now, you know what we know. It does none of us any good to conjecture on speculation, especially not at this late hour. As you said, she’s sleeping, so there will be no further answers for any of us tonight. I suggest you take the opportunity to return to Chrome. He’s wired the sick bay to alert you instantly if a patient even snores funny. At the first sign of a change, you’ll be the first to hear of it, I promise. Please, Drea. Go rest. You’ll be a better help to her if you’re not using every spare amount of energy to keep yourself from getting annoyed at Bronze. That is a feat that can tax even the strongest warrior.” He winked at her.
“Asshole,” Bronze muttered.
Drea shuffled her feet and let the seraph kiss her on her forehead. “Fine. But the second she’s up, I’ll be here, and I want answers.” The look she threw Bronze over her shoulder could have melted whatever poor stubborn polar ice caps still remained.
Message received.
Bronze nodded his thanks and hefted as much appreciation as possible into the grin he volleyed back. “You’re the best, as always. Get some rest.”
“Don’t”—her jaw cracked on a yawn she was too slow to cover up—“tell me what to do.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Once her footsteps turned into nothing more than retreating echoes, Bronze stood next to Rhode. “She’s going to kill you for lying to her. You know that, right?”
“Who said I lied?”
“Drea does not know what we know, because I saw the way your eyes settled on the lycan woman’s belongings before Drea stuffed them into a plastic bag. You know something, or at least some part of you recognized something of hers.” Bronze let the note of challenge settle around the hallway. When it hit the floor unanswered, a different kind of unease reverberated back at him through the quiet, and he cursed inwardly.
It was a dangerous thing to tear secrets out of spies. But to attempt to unearth them from a former spy who’d been tortured, lost to time, experimented on, and rescued with no knowledge of what happened or whether the celestial powers stolen from him would ever return?
Forget honey badgers. Bronze had just poked an unstable atomic bomb held together by secrets and seclusion.
Despite the cold warning swirling in Rhode’s eyes, Bronze never bristled. He had too many questions about the lycan woman, and the memories of how he found her, coupled with the remnants of the sun deity’s little lycan prophecy where he was concerned, only made him twitchier.
Rhode let his chest fall and directed Bronze to another empty patient room across the hall. “Let’s talk.”
The identical four walls, beige cabinetry, and jars containing every possible size of sterile-wrapped gauze under the sun made for a terrible audience to what Bronze needed to both say and hear.
After he spent so many eons cracking jokes and lightening the mood at the expense of his brothers, the ironic change of spotlight that was only enhanced by the sterile glow of all that medical shit was an oddly hollow experience. His past was so riddled with sunken holes and buried promises, he sometimes wondered whether there was anything of worth to find there at all. When Saulé, the celestial goddess with the supremely unhelpful lycan premonition, cast down her beam of light on him, he’d half expected it to bounce around an empty tunnel shrouded with nothing but cobwebs that shielded up his trap doors.
He should have known someone would eventually test the load-bearing qualities of his past to see just how swiftly those in his life would fall through.
Rhode strode into the room after him with a large plastic bag in his hand.
Bronze lifted a brow. “It’s a little late for takeout, but I can always eat.”
Once the door shut them into the small space, Rhode placed the bag on top of the counter, and the familiar garments the lycan woman had worn when Bronze had found her were pulled out in a neatly folded pile. Everything had been dried and folded into a succinct little bundle, and Bronze tried not to look too closely at the loose white blouse that sat on top. If he stared at the fabric with the same intensity the damn thing called to him with, the conjured image of a pair of perfect breasts molded with the stuff would distract him away from the answers he intended to throttle out of Rhode.
Bronze swallowed hard and sliced his gaze away, instead focusing on the peculiar necklace Rhode had grabbed that had been tucked beneath the woman’s outerwear.
The thing kind of looked like a cross between a large fang and a small horn of some kind, though why the woman would wear it was beyond even his wildest fashion sense, which wasn’t saying a whole lot considering he pretty much vacillated between graphic tees, various leather chest holsters and baldrics, and full-body metallic armor.
“What’s that?” he asked. “Something of hers?”
Rhode took the necklace—for it was a necklace, judging by the thin strap of leather Bronze now recognized from when he’d examined her neck for injury—and placed it by itself on the counter, far away from everything else. Though the seraph held the object with great care, he also wasted no time releasing the thing. Once his fingers were free and clear of what looked like bone matter, he breathed a soft sigh of relief and collapsed onto the small nearby stool. Even though he had been rescued from captivity the better part of a year ago, he was still occasionally plagued by bouts of exhaustion and weakness. Damn, it hurt to see, but Bronze wouldn’t belittle the angel’s progress or pride by looking away.
“I’ve seen something like this before,” Rhode said calmly once he’d regained more control of himself.
“You have? Where?”
There was a long pause where those umber eyes of his seemed to glaze over with some distant memories before returning to the present. “At Cyro’s grotto.”
Every molecule in Bronze’s body stood up and took notice.
“What?” Bronze dropped his arms and pushed away from the counter he’d taken a lean-to on. He had half a mind to charge at the seraph and shake more words out of him, but that faraway haze returned again and, with it, an eerie sense that what Rhode was about to reveal was just as much for his benefit as Bronze’s.
