Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121854 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 609(@200wpm)___ 487(@250wpm)___ 406(@300wpm)
His body continued to tremble with his tears. I didn’t want anyone to know. Not even you. He’d been able to bear Raphael’s knowledge only because of who Raphael was to him, to them.
“I knew.” Illium’s voice was crushed rock. “You had a nightmare in the Medica about a month after we brought you home, woke up screaming things that hinted at it. I decided to wait for you to be ready to talk about it.”
Two hundred years, his Blue had waited. Two hundred years he’d continued to love him.
Love unconditional.
Emotion racked his entire body, until he could no longer identify the different strands.
A warmth at the small of his back, a softly furred and tiny body curling into him.
Illium and Smoke held him between them as he cried himself to exhaustion with the only beings in all the world to whom he could be this vulnerable.
He didn’t dream that night, his sleep endless and deep.
* * *
* * *
Illium continued to stroke Aodhan’s hair and back long after the other man had fallen asleep, Smoke’s purr having gone silent as she joined Adi in sleep. His heart had fucking shattered with each one of Aodhan’s tears, but he’d found a grim happiness in them, too.
Because, for a long, long time, Aodhan had refused to cry.
It was as if he’d decided that he’d had enough time to recover from his torture and abuse, that he must now be stoic, his pain locked up in the most impenetrable part of his psyche. He might’ve retreated from the world, but he’d also retreated from himself, refusing to even acknowledge his scars.
Raphael alone must have known the entirety of it, because he’d stripped the minds of Aodhan’s abusers. Illium had no doubt that the sire had tried to get Aodhan to open up to the healers, but not even an archangel could make a savaged young angel speak of his horror if he preferred to encase that horror in stone and shove it away out of sight.
Raphael also wouldn’t have dishonored the trust between them by forcing the issue. Especially not when Aodhan had been so fragile, body and mind held together by the gossamer cobwebs of hope and will. Later…well, Illium’s lover was too strong, too stubborn, too determined to just conquer it.
Tonight, Illium had felt the stone casing not only crack but fall away. Because Aodhan hadn’t retreated after speaking of the crimes against him. He’d curled impossibly closer, his own wings folded back so that Illium could enclose him in silver blue.
“You are extraordinary,” Illium whispered, pressing a kiss to the diamond-bright strands of Aodhan’s hair as heat stung his eyes.
I love you. More than air and sunlight, more than the sky or art.
Illium’s entire being felt as if it had shifted this night, undergoing a fundamental change from which there could never be any return.
He’d never been jealous of Aodhan’s art, or his affinity to sunlight, or anything else that brought him joy. This wasn’t about that. Neither was it about a declaration of love. He’d never doubted that Aodhan loved him—that fact was a simple and inexorable part of his existence.
It was…
He couldn’t break it down, couldn’t put the emotion into words. He just knew that he was no longer the same man he’d been before this night.
I love you. More than air and sunlight, more than the sky or art.
The hours past reverberated inside him, his very cells stamped with the sparkle of stardust that was Aodhan.
21
Aodhan had never personally spoken to Céline prior to the call she made to him the following morning. He had, however, long been aware of her as an artist. A woman who worked in creative bursts, she hadn’t produced anything he’d term art for the past century—to him, the gloves didn’t qualify, for well made as they were, they broke no boundaries of design. However, prior to her latest fallow period, she’d sculpted breathtaking pieces in clay, and prior to that, she’d worked with stone, and so on.
Far older than him, she had a much deeper artistic history. But for all her undeniable talent, she was no Hummingbird, whose art seemed to transcend time itself. Céline’s work had never quite hit that master-level edge—most likely because she never invested the time to take her raw talent in each discipline to the next level.
Had she stuck with the sculptures, for one, she would by now be Eh-ma’s peer.
“Celi is like a butterfly,” the Hummingbird had said to him with a sigh. “I have two of her pieces in the gardens of our southernmost home, and I love them for their naked energy, but I also see that she became frustrated and didn’t push through to the next phase, to that which would have taken a good piece to a brilliant one.”
Aside from that small bit of insight, Aodhan had no idea of the personality of the angel he was about to meet when he answered the call in the living area of his suite.