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“Lights on low,” I said as I strode toward the kitchen. Soft mellow light flared through the darkness, gleaming off the exposed metal struts and lending the brick walls additional warmth. Tao had left the remains of last night’s roast in the fridge, so I made myself a sandwich and a coffee and worked my way through both as I sorted through the stack of mail sitting on the kitchen table.
With that done, I had a quick shower, then headed for bed. I woke hours later with the sensation that something was wrong. For several minutes, I did nothing more than lie there, listening to the silence and wondering what the hell it was that I’d sensed. The apartment was silent, and there was little in the air to suggest that I was anything other than alone.
And yet the wrongness remained, scratching along the outer edges of my consciousness.
Frowning, I groped for my phone. No messages. Not that I’d really expected any. Tao would have finished his shift several hours ago and was no doubt chasing tail at one of the clubs, and Ilianna was with Mirri. If I rang either—especially given it was barely eight in the morning—I would not be popular.
“Perhaps it is nothing more than a premonition,” Azriel said.
I twisted around. He stood at the window, his hands behind his back, his stance that of soldier on guard. Valdis was silent, but her hilt, touched by a glimmer of sunlight, gleamed like a star.
“I can do without premonitions like that, thank you very much.” I rose and padded across to where he stood. Tension rolled briefly across his shoulders, but he didn’t otherwise acknowledge me. “Especially when they’re that fucking vague.”
My gaze dropped from the broadness of his shoulders to the stylized tattoos decorating his well-defined back. While the biggest of these was the Dušan, there were others. Some were recognizable—like a rose, or an eye with a comet’s tail—while others appeared to be little more than random swirls. He’d told me once they were his tribal signature, although I had no idea what that really meant.
I raised a hand and ran my fingertips along the length of one of the swirls. The tattoo pulsed with dark fire, and tension rippled down the muscular length of his back.
“Azriel—”
“What you want is not wise, Risa.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know.” There was a hint of resignation in his voice, but he still refused to turn around.
I let my fingers trail on, tracing the outline of a comet. The tension in him grew. “Tell me,” I said softly. “If you and I were both reapers, would you be standing there with your back to me right now?”
“No, I would not.”
“Then don’t do it now.”
He sighed. “You do not understand the risk—”
“If assimilation is our fate, Azriel, then it will happen whether or not we make love.”
“I was not talking about assimilation.”
“Then what were you talking about?”
He didn’t answer. He never did when it came to questions like that. I tried a different tack. “You once said that reapers make love by combining energies. Can we at least attempt something like that, if you’re so set against physical lovemaking right now?”
“We could.” He hesitated. “But I doubt it would be any wiser, and for even more reasons.”
“Damn it, Azriel, just this once, why don’t you forget reason? What the hell do you want?”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he sighed and said, almost inaudibly, “You.”
And with that, he turned around, took me in his arms, and kissed me fiercely.
Chapter 5
There was nothing sweet about this kiss, nothing soft, because it was filled with all the hunger of a man in desperate need. I wrapped my arms around his neck and returned it in kind, and for what seemed like ages, there was nothing but the kiss and the desire that exploded between us.
When he finally pulled back, his eyes burned with a hunger deeper than anything I’d ever seen before. “Just so you know, reapers do not engage in kisses like that.”
“Well, they sure as hell should.”
He smiled, then caught my hand and led me toward the bed. “I agree that there is something rather satisfying about flesh-on-flesh contact, be it lips or something more intimate.”
