“Yes.”
The word hangs between us.
Yes. Simple. Absolute.
The acknowledgment of an approaching reality that neither of us can prevent and both of us have been watching arrive with the specific dread of people who know what happens to crimson wielders when they’re discovered.
“I can’t go back up there,” I say, and my voice cracks onup therebecause up there is the school and the Hunters and the ADU that’s being assembled and Elara with her notebook and Constantine with his altered files and the entire fragile web of lies that has been keeping me alive. “If my shadows start glowing red in the middle of a classroom — “
“We have time.” Bael’s hands find my face. Cool palms against my cheeks. Green eyes burning with the specific intensity of a man who has waited centuries for me and is not going to lose me to a color. “Not much. But enough. I can teach you to suppress the crimson temporarily — push it beneath the surface the way you push your wings beneath your skin. It will hold for hours at a time. Enough to get through the school day.”
“And then?”
“And then we use the time that buys us to figure out the next step. With Constantine. With the records he found. With everything we know and everything we haven’t learned yet.”
He pulls me closer.
My wings fold around us — crimson tips painting him in the color I’ve been hiding from the world.
Red light on his pale skin, on his dark hair, on the sharp angles of his face that I’ve memorized through months of looking at him in the dark.
The crimson turns him into something from a painting — shadows and light and the blood-red color between them, the same color that the ancient texts say marks the bridge.
“You’re beautiful,” he says, and the word carries the weight of someone who has lived long enough to have seen everything beauty can look like and has decided that this — a womanwith crimson wings in an underground chamber with the world closing in around her — is the version that matters most.
My shadows reach for him.
Crimson-tinged darkness wrapping around his body with the desperate need that the mate bond amplifies until need becomes gravity — the physical pull of a connection that was written into my blood before I understood what blood could carry.
He lets them come.
Doesn’t flinch from the crimson the way everyone else would — the way the Hunters would, the way the Light Nephilim would, the way the world that has been killing my kind for nine hundred years would if they could see what his eyes are seeing right now.
He opens his arms and lets my crimson shadows cover him and the acceptance in that gesture breaks something loose in my chest that I didn’t know was holding.
I kiss him. Hard.
With the fear and the grief and the specific desperate hunger of a woman whose body is betraying her by becoming what it was always meant to become and who needs to feel something that isn’t terror for five goddamn minutes.
He catches me. Lifts me.
My back hits the sanctuary wall and my wings spread against the stone and the crimson light fills the chamber — red-gold, warm, pulsing with my heartbeat, the color that marks me as the harbinger painting every surface in the shade that the ancient world revered and the modern world destroys.
Bael’s mouth on my throat. The claiming marks flaring under his lips.
His hands on my thighs, holding me against the wall with the strength that he usually controls and isn’t controlling now because the crimson is doing something to the mate bond —amplifying it, deepening it, the color carrying a power that the bond responds to by opening channels I didn’t know existed.
My shadows wrap around him.
Crimson darkness against his skin, and where the color touches him it creates sensation — not the cold of shadow or the weight of darkness but something new.
Warmth that comes from the crimson itself. A heat that isn’t fire but isn’t shadow either, the thermal signature of a power that lives between the two and carries properties of both.
He gasps.
The sound — raw, surprised, pulled from a man who has not been surprised by physical sensation in centuries — makes something in me go liquid and hot.
“The crimson,” he breathes against my skin. “It feels like — “
