gave any sign that she wanted him to stop.
Instead, she closed her eyes and rested her head against his hand.
He leaned across the grimwolf leather jacket and kissed her. He did it without thinking, as if his lips were meant to be there.
She let out a tiny sigh and slid her arms around his neck.
Rhun awoke to the lemony smell of chemical cleaning fluid. He laid a palm against his aching chest, remembering.
He pushed himself up on an elbow. He was in a bedroom with white curtains drawn against the light. A few steps away a woman was lying on the wooden floor. Nadia. He remembered now. Nadia. Emmanuel. The bunker. He listened for Erin’s and Jordan’s heartbeats, heard them on the other side of a wall. The soft rumble of their voices comforted him.
He used the headboard to lift himself to his feet.
Nadia stirred, stretching like a waking cat. “Better?”
Rhun stood, swaying. “Were you hurt?”
“Only my leg.” She stood, too, more easily than he had. “It will mend.”
Rhun envied her. “Were the others wounded?”
“The soldier has luck,” she said. “The woman is a talented shooter, even with a pistol, and she had the sense to stay low.”
“Piers?” Rhun looked around the darkened room.
“Gone.” Nadia explained all that had happened since Rhun was shot in the forest.
Rhun circled to the most disturbing question. “How did the Belial know where we were, where to ambush us?”
His team’s departure from Jerusalem had been known only by the Cardinal and his innermost circle.
Nadia sighed, concerned. “I think the best course of action is for me to return to the abbey with news of Emmanuel’s death, to claim you and the others died, too. That will give you time to operate outside the range of the Church and any spies, to hide your next steps on the way to the Blood Gospel.”
Rhun nodded. They needed to keep their search secret from the Belial. “What about Piers? What will you say about him?”
“I’ll tell them what I found,” she said. “A shame that I only noticed
“So you will not tell them of the Russian soldiers?”
“If the Church learns that Russian soldiers from St. Petersburg had been in the same bunker as the Blood Gospel, they will send more than a
Rhun nodded. No Sanguinist had ever returned from St. Petersburg alive since the traitorous Vitandus took command there. To retrieve anything from Russia, the Church would have to send an army. And every casualty would weaken their order in the battle they must eventually fight against the Belial.
“We must go alone,” Rhun said. “Both to prevent a war and for any hope of recovering the book.”
“And what about the humans? It will be dangerous to bring them.”
“The Vitandus may hate our order, but he maintains a strange sense of honor. It may be enough to keep them safe.”
From the other side of the wall, Rhun heard Jordan’s and Erin’s hearts beat faster.
“I can plainly see your affection for them, Rhun,” Nadia said. “Do you think that the Russian will not?”
“I can’t leave them here.” He tried to block out the sounds of Erin and Jordan. “If the Belial have agents within the Sanguinist ranks, their lives might be more at risk here than if I took them to Russia.”
“Then the matter is settled.” Nadia stood and put on her chain belt.
“I will need papers for us all,” Rhun added.
“I will get them for you in secret.”
Rhun considered the path on which he was about to embark. For the first time in his long, long life, he was about to be sundered from the Church, even if only for a time. He felt bereft.
Nadia headed toward the door. “And I will bring you something you can trade for safe passage. Something precious to the ruler of St. Petersburg.”
Even Nadia did not dare to speak
He had once been a Sanguinist, but he had broken the Church’s laws so violently that he had been excommunicated—and not an ordinary excommunication, but a banishment that could not be undone, one so severe that all who knew him must shun him forever after.
In the end, his name had become his curse: Vitandus.
Erin smiled when Jordan lifted her over the leather jacket and onto his lap. She now straddled him, staring down at his impish smile. “What happened to staying on your side?”
“You’re the one who came over to my side.” He kissed her lightly on the lips and a shiver ran down her spine.
She couldn’t argue with that. With one foot, she kicked the grimwolf jacket onto the floor.
Jordan grinned up at her. “Problem solved.”
She stroked a hand across his jaw. Smooth from his recent shave. She kissed him again. He smelled like eucalyptus shaving cream, and he tasted like coffee.
She pulled back and gazed into those beautiful blue eyes. “Your eyes are Egyptian blue, like the sun god Ra.”
“I’m taking that as a compliment.”
He slid one warm palm around the small of her back, then pulled her so tightly against his chest that she felt his heartbeat against her breast.
She relaxed against him, feeling safe.
Then he shifted his lips, found her mouth, and kissed her hard. A yearning urgency flowed from his lips to hers. She moaned between them and threaded her fingers through his hair, pulling him even closer.
She wanted to forget everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, blot out every bad memory. The only thing she had room for in her head was the two of them. He stroked his hands along her body.
With one arm around her back, he used the other to ease her around and under him on the bed.
She stretched under his weight, feeling his muscular bulk settle upon her. Her hands stroked down his broad back. She slid them under his shirt, felt the smooth warmth of his skin. He pulled his T-shirt over his head in one quick movement, revealing the blaze of his tattoo down one side, the branching fractal marking the lightning strike, a testament to his brief experience of death.
Her finger traced one of the forking lines, raising a shiver over his flesh.
He was far from dead now: his breath heaved, heat radiated from him, his eyes shone deep into hers.
Never breaking from her gaze, he undid the belt of her robe and smoothed back both sides. Only then did his eyes drift down, devouring her body, leaving heat in their wake without him even touching her.
“Wow,” he silently mouthed.
She drew him down to her, gasping when his bare skin touched hers. His mouth found hers again. Erin lost herself in the kiss. Her heart raced against his, and her breath caught, held, then sped, too.
He raised his lips from hers, just a finger’s breadth, and she lifted up to meet them again. He kissed down her throat. She tilted her neck and arched her head back against the pillow, feeling strands of wet hair fall across her face but not wanting to take her hands from his body for even a second to brush them away. His lips moved lower, grazed along the top of her collarbone, ending on the hollow of her throat.
“Erin?” His question brushed soft against her neck.
She knew what he asked, and she knew what she wanted to answer. But she didn’t speak. “Wait.” The word came out breathless. She pushed him away and pulled the robe closed. “Too fast.”
“Slower,” he said. “Got it.”
She tied the robe. Her heart raced, and she wanted nothing more than to flee back to the warmth of his arms. But she didn’t trust that. She couldn’t.
