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He hesitated. “By leashing our energy beings together.”
Fear curled through me. A fear unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. “You leashed our beings? As in, forever bound together?”
“Yes.”
“So if you die, I die?”
“If I die, you take my place.”
I stared at him. Did that mean . . . ? “No, that’s not possible. I’m a flesh-and-blood being. I can never be what you are.”
“You were never just flesh and blood, Risa. You were born half Aedh and became more so after what Marin did. When I snatched you from fate’s pathway, I altered not only your destiny, but your very being.”
No, no, no! How was something like that possible? How could I be born one thing and be made, on death, into another?
“What if I die? What if I decide to kill myself rather than become something I never wanted to be?”
Something flickered through his eyes. Anger, fear, hurt. I wasn’t entirely sure. “You would not kill yourself.”
“But what if I did?” I all but shouted.
“Then you would still become what I am—a dark angel.”
I just stared at him. I couldn’t do anything else. I was stunned. Broken. Betrayed. Again.
“Damn it, Azriel, why?”
“You know why.”
“The mission. The key.” I swung away, not wanting to look at him, not wanting him to see the hurt. It was always the damn key. Always about the damn mission.
“It wasn’t about the damn mission or the key!” The sharp denial was accompanied by an explosion of anger that rolled my senses and just about fried my mind. “And if you’d listen to your heart and your body, you’d know it!”
I closed my eyes. Listen to my body, he said. Which implied he knew not only that I was pregnant but that the child was his.
So he’d saved what was rare and precious in his world. Not me. Never me.
“Damn it, Risa, that’s not—”
“Isn’t it?” I cut in and scrubbed a hand across suddenly aching eyes. I wouldn’t cry. I wouldn’t. “I listened to my heart, Azriel. I let you in. And you repaid that trust by taking away everything from me—”
“I haven’t—”
“You took my future, Azriel! When I die, I won’t move on. I won’t be reborn.” Wouldn’t ever meet Mom again. “How can you stand there and say you haven’t taken everything away?”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t deny anything.
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the windowpane. “I can’t do this anymore, Azriel.”
“Do what?”
Just for a moment, I swear there was fear in his voice. But that had to be imagination. Reapers didn’t do fear. Didn’t do emotions. Not the way I wanted emotions, anyway.
“You. Me. I can’t do it. I don’t want you near me. I don’t want you in my life. I don’t want you following me around anymore.”
“Risa, that’s not possible without—”
I swung around, my fists clenched against the sudden explosion of anger. “I don’t care what is or isn’t possible. I just want you out of my life!”
