Page 36 of Trick Of Light

How strange that I hadn’t thought about it either, and only then did I remember that it had somehow changed, tightening and becoming the color of my skin. It had camouflaged itself, as though sentient, and that was extraordinary.

“What bracelet are you—that silver one?” the baron rasped, getting shakily to his feet, and I was guessing that suddenly he saw it easily on my bound wrist.

“Yes. That one,” Raphael replied in a flat voice devoid of anything but wrath and certainty.

There was only a stifled keening then, the cry of a man about to be ended.

“You’re right. I should not be able to be here. The depths of hell are shrouded to angels, which is how you kept Remiel from his love, from the incubus demon Vaya, but the moment you planned to kill my love, my mate…my spouse…that was your undoing.”

“Spouse?”

“The sacrament you missed,” Raphael snarled.

“No!”

“Yes,” he whispered, and his slight laughter was dark and twisted, almost evil, the sound carrying both resignation and pain. “It’s the wrinkle you didn’t perceive—that a warder with angelic blood, in thrall to an angel, pledged to one, married to one, can never be parted from the other half of his soul.”

“I didn’t know!”

“I don’t care,” Raphael husked, and then both my mate and the baron were gone from my line of sight. Something wet hit my back, and in the same moment I saw an arch of red droplets fall like rain, striking the silk sheets at eye level with me.

There was pressure on my arched back, and then hot breath in my ear. “Jackson,” he growled, low and dark.

“Raph,” I whimpered, loathing the helplessness in my voice. “Thank God you found me. I—”

Everything shifted around me, altered, and there was the scent of bergamot and sage, pine and leather. The bed was different, softer, the ropes as well. But I was in the same position; that was unchanged.

“Raph?”

“Tell me,” he said, and I barely heard him with how low and deep his voice was. “What do you think would have happened if the baron had violated you?” he asked, and through the ropes, his hand smoothed down over my ass. “What would have happened to us?”

“I don’t—” I couldn’t see him, though I tried, straining even for a glimpse of him, needing to see his face. “Untie me!” I demanded sharply.

“You will answer,” he insisted, hands testing the ropes before tracing over my skin.

I turned my head to the left and saw a wall covered in inlaid tile, then to my right, a red velvet chaise edged in gold brocade. A different room, a different place. “Raph…lemme go.”

“Answer,” he demanded again, and his voice was hoarse, gravelly. “And be honest, or I’ll know.”

I took a shallow breath because the ropes were too tight for me to take a deep one. “I thought I was better off dead than…”

“Defiled,” he offered.

“Yes,” I croaked out, voice cracking, trying to squirm and finding all my movement, as I logically knew it would be, utterly restricted.

He made a noise, and there was the aroma of warm honey-scented oil, a smell that, because it was his favorite, was inexorably linked to Raphael in my mind.

“Raph, I’m—oh,” I choked, breath catching as he slowly, with great care, slid two slippery fingers inside me.

“There is nothing that could ever, ever befall you that would change my love or desire for you,” he said solemnly, reverently, as he withdrew his fingers, only to press them into my body again, slathered with more oil, making circles with his fingers, massaging my channel with one hand and using the other to trace over my cock, now slowly thickening and pressing to my abdomen.

“Raph, please, you’ve gotta—”

“Did you hear me, Jackson? Did you hear what I said?” he asked as he shoved three slick fingers into my ass.

“Yes,” I ground out, lost in the sensations he was pulling out of me.

“You can’t be kept from me,” he intoned as he slid his hand free, climbing onto the bed behind me and kissing slowly, seductively, down my spine. “But even if you could, even if I found you, as you are now, but also taken and used, with the seed of others spilled on you, in you, I would do all that I could to heal your mind, body, and soul, but you would know, always, that you have my heart, and yours is my greatest treasure.”