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“Ready?” He hated the roughness in his tone. The last thing he wanted was to scare her, but she made for a full sensory overload.One problem at a time. He needed to take her from this cursed place to somewhere safe. Then he could interrogate her.
She nodded against him. “Archives,” she said. “Lower level, main building off the entrance to this tower.” She hesitated. “Unless Noxx moved them since the last time she held me here a year or so ago.”
Alexei fought a growl at the mention of her imprisonment. Nope, he wouldn’t scare his tiny might-be-fated mate.
Diego led them down the stairs, taking point and checking their surroundings with each twist and turn. They made it to the lower level. “Clear so far,” the sniper whispered.
“There.” Joelle’s warm breath tickled his ear.
Heading in the direction she pointed, Alexei tried to maintain full concentration on their surroundings and not the way she snuggled closer.
Stopping at the doorway, Diego motioned for them to head inside. “I’ll keep lookout.”
Walking past glass-encased helmets, wands, and spears, Alexei calculated the immense value of the relics based upon the antiquity and radiating power levels alone. “What is this place?” he asked her. “It looks like a museum.”
“Might as well be. The Order confiscates magical artefacts and displays them here like trophies. This far from towns or cities, no one will come looking for supernatural souvenirs like these…or me.” The hurt in her voice twisted a dark need in him, calling to the villain in him to play hero for her.
He let her slip to her feet, careful to avoid the blood stains.
“Clock starts now,” he said. “What are you looking for? It’ll go faster if we both search.” He would rather haul her against him and fly her as far away from here as fast as he could, but she’d been adamant about this stop. It meant something to her—something important.
“I’m looking for documents.” She yanked on the handle of a file cabinet, but the drawer stuck. “It’s locked.”
Of course, it would be. At least she hadn’t wanted him to smash the glass on a display case that would probably trigger an alarm. He pulled the lockpick kit from his pocket again, glad his goblin cousin specialized in keeping the best and most portable thief gear. The cabinet’s metal squeaked as he slid the tension wrench into place.
Joelle’s soft gasp had him stopping. “All my life, I’ve imagined being able to let myself out of the doors the Order locked me behind.”
Her casual confession of being imprisoned for years made him remember a girl with fear in her eyes who had shoved her prized book at him, and he struggled to get his rage under control while he went to work, unlocking the cabinet in moments.
She rifled through the contents with the soft rustle of paper flipping and smacking of files on files. Judging by the crumbling pages and musty smell, some of the records had to be old.
Grabbing a sheath of pages, she put them on top of the cabinet. He reached for them, and she smacked his hand with a quickno. So much for his worries about scaring her.
Apop,popfollowed by a thud came from the doorway. “We’ve got trouble,” Diego said.
A piercing alarm that mimicked the high-low tones of a European police siren ripped through the room. The racket echoed off the glass cases and stone walls.
“Time to go.” Alexei stated the obvious when Joelle seemed absorbed in skimming whatever she’d found. Gun blasts from the hallway told him Diego had engaged multiple shooters. The sniper would be fine.
His maybe-mate snatched the pages she’d pulled along with another file and shoved it inside the ballistic vest he’d put on her. He’d had to double wrap the fasteners to make the thing tight enough, but judging by the way the pages stayed, he’d done an adequate job. If he could’ve found a helmet and full-body Kevlar, he might be less concerned about her in a fight.
“Stay behind me,” he ordered.
A shooter slipped past Diego through the doorway, firing in a deafening blast that shattered one of the glass cases.
Using his demon magic, Alexei shot a wave of power, rocking the floor and sending the man stumbling across the room tothwackinto the wall. Blood stood out vivid and bright red against the jagged grey stones. Theping, pingof glass dropping on concrete pierced the roar in Alexei’s ears from the boom. Raising his pistol, he advanced to finish the man off, but Joelle hurried past.
The strange symbols beneath her skin glowed. “I can heal him,” she said.
“He tried to kill us.”
“And he helped Noxx torture me for years, but that doesn’t mean he has to die.” She reached for the man’s head.
Taking in the bloody footprints from where she’d cut open her feet in her rush to help someone who deserved nothing less than a slow, painful death for his transgressions, Alexei’s inner demon roared to take over, to yank her away from the scum. Joelle helped those who had tortured her at risk to her own safety. Only one species might be self-sacrificing enough to consider such kindness, and he had never met one before her—angels.
Sadness rushed through him when he realized that if this woman washisJoelle, his mate, an angel who traced her namesake in the Moscow snow, then he didn’t deserve her. His future relied on him doing monstrous things for his people, not being kind enough to heal those who hurt the innocent. At least only demon descendants felt the mating call. He’d heard the humans and rare supernaturals to whom they might be matched wouldn’t experience the same and wouldn’t know the gut-wrenching loss of a forever, meant-to-be love because they didn’t recognize it in the first place.
He would save her and walk away from her. It was the only way.
