He didn’t believe that for a second. “And you’ll say or do anything.”
Now she smiled again. “Too right, Jim, my love. Too right.”
He dropped his hold as if she burned him, his stomach clenching up as he recognized the light in her eyes.
“That’s right, Jim,” she murmured. “I have feelings for you. And that scares you, doesn’t it. Afraid you’ll reciprocate?”
“Not. At. All.”
“Ah, well, we’ll have to work on that.”
Before he could stop her, she rose up and captured his mouth, kissing him quick and then biting his lower lip hard enough to draw blood.
She stepped back fast, as if she knew she was pushing it. “Bye for now, Jim. But we’ll be seeing each other soon. I promise.”
With disgust, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat on her floor. And he was about to cut her down, when he frowned, thinking of what Nigel had said on the lawn.
Now Jim was the one smiling—albeit grimly. There were worse things than having your enemy fall in love with you: As strong as she was, as unpredictable and dangerous as her powers were, that look in her eyes right now, that burning, out-of-control look, was a weapon.
Beating back his own emotions, he found himself reaching down and jacking his cock with his palm.
Devina’s reaction was instantaneous and electric. Her hot stare flashed to his hips, her mouth parting like she couldn’t catch enough air, her breasts rising over the bodice of her dress.
“You want this?” he asked gruffly.
Like a puppet, she nodded.
“Not good enough,” he told her, hating her, hating himself. “Say it, bitch.
In a hoarse, hungry voice, she breathed, “I
Jim released the hold on himself, feeling filthy inside and out. But war was ugly, wasn’t it, even if you were on the good, moral side.
Means to an end, he thought. His body and her need were means to an end, and he would use them if he had to.
“Good,” he growled. “That’s good.”
With that, he willed his body to rise up from the floor, this time the twisting energy summoned up by him and no one else.
As he levitated higher and higher, Devina reached for him, her face contouring into a kind of painful desire that juiced him up.
And then he wasn’t looking at her anymore; he was scanning the walls of her dungeon, searching for the girl he hated leaving behind yet again . . . as well as the boss he had tried to save and failed.
He would be back for the former. But the latter . . . he feared that Matthias had been laid to rest for an eternity, his never-ending suffering having been well-earned.
Jim mourned the loss of the man, however.
He’d wanted to redeem the guy.
Jim came back to consciousness on Captain Alistair Childe’s lawn. And as he thought back to his first assignment, it seemed he excelled at coming and going on grass.
Adrian and Eddie were on either side of him, the two angels grave and serious.
“We lost,” Jim said. As if they didn’t already know.
Adrian put his hand out, and when Jim reached up, the guy helped pull him to his feet. “We lost,” Jim muttered again.
Looking over his shoulder, he thought briefly about going into the farmhouse and helping Isaac take care of Matthias’s remains, but he decided to stay put. The soldier was going to have a hard enough time making sense of all the things that couldn’t be explained—more contact with Jim was just going to give him another thing to get fucked in the head about.
“Caldwell,” Jim said to his boys. “We’re going back to Caldwell.”
“Fair enough,” Eddie murmured, like he wasn’t surprised in the slightest.
And Jim wasn’t going to worry who was next in the game. As he’d learned with this particular assignment, the souls were going to find him. So he might as well follow what the center of his chest was telling him: namely that it was about time for the Barten family to have their daughter’s body to bury properly.
Jim was just the angel to make that happen.
Unfurling his great, luminescent wings, he took one last stare through the kitchen windows. Isaac Rothe was working with grim purpose, handling things with the same kind of competence and strength as he always had.
He was going to be fine—provided he was smart enough to hang around with that attorney. God, if you were lucky enough to find love like that? Only a fool would turn that shit down.
Jim took to the night sky as if he’d been born to it, his wings carrying him through the cool air, the wind hitting his face and fingering through his hair, his team of two right behind him.
Next battle he was going to be quicker on the dime. And he was going to use his new weapon against Devina to its fullest advantage.
Even if it killed him.
CHAPTER 52
As Grier got undressed in her closet, she hung her black suit up along with the others and found it impossible not to remember the way everything had been arranged before. Suits had previously been to the left of the door. Now they were straight ahead.
In just her silk blouse and her stockings, she padded around, touching her clothes, wondering which had been rehung that afternoon by her . . . and what Isaac had done after she’d left.
Closing her eyes, she wanted to weep but didn’t have the energy.
There had been nothing from him since the all-clear that night a week ago—which, incidentally, he’d sent via text instead of doing in person or over the phone.
After that? No calls, no e-mails, no visits.
It was as if he’d never existed.
And he’d left nothing behind. When she’d come back to this house, the business card that Matthias had given her as well as the strips of cloth from the muscle shirt and the file full of dossiers had disappeared. Along with both bodies and the two cars out in Lincoln.
Foolishly, she’d looked for a note, just as she had the first time he’d “left,” but there hadn’t been one. And sometimes, in the middle of the night when she couldn’t sleep, she went searching again, checking her bedside tables and the kitchen counters and even here in the closet.
Nothing.
The only thing she supposed he’d left behind was this closet put back together. But that was hardly something she could keep in her diary and take out from time to time when she was feeling melancholic.
In the intervening seven days, work had kept her going, forcing her to get up in the morning when all she wanted to do was pull the covers over her head and lie in bed all day: Every morning, she’d gotten up and gotten herself dressed and had her coffee and become stuck in traffic on the short drive to the Financial District, where their offices were.
Her father had been great. They’d had dinner together every single night, just as they’d been in the habit of doing before. . . .
