I poured out my magic. I shared my feelings, my emotions, my desire—I opened up everything to him, bared myself. It was just me, unfiltered and unshielded. He’d seen me without my clothes, but he’d never truly seen me naked, stripped of everything. I showed him every secret, every dark corner of my mind and soul, giving him all that I had. That was the power of Siren’s Song. There was nothing better than this, nothing more intimate.
He showed me how wrong I was when his magic hit me like a high-speed train. He’d opened up a window into his soul, just for me and no one else. I experienced the full force of everything that he was, the endless labyrinth of delightful complexity; the torn soul, a firestorm of light and dark, of strength and of fear. And of his love for me, so deep it made me dizzy with desire. I had to have him again.
And he wanted me. I could feel the intense longing in his emotions, in the pulse of his body, in the way that he filled me so deeply. He began to move gently inside me, teasing my soft, sensitive flesh swollen with desire.
His mouth brushed down my neck in soft butterfly kisses. I squirmed impatiently. I didn’t want him to be gentle; I wanted him to release the shackles of propriety and take me hard and rough.
He flipped me over. Looking down on me, he set his hand over my heart and declared, “Your soul is so beautiful.”
I met his eyes. “So is yours,” I said solemnly, without smirk or sass.
He leaned down and kissed my forehead softly. Hot, sweet anticipation swelled inside of me as his hands gently parted my thighs. He gripped my hips and thrust once into me—then he pulled back, his muscles hard and tight as he loomed over me, his eyes alight with dark delight.
“More,” I moaned, my fingernails digging into his back in wild, feverish desperation. I arched my back, tilting up my hips.
He slammed me back down on the mattress. His hands locked around my wrists, pinning me to the bed, he plunged deeper into me, each movement forceful and relentless. I cried out, swept up in a blur of pleasure that blinded me to everything but Nero.
The bed shook and groaned under us. Lust, raw and unbridled, burned in his eyes. He was so close. I wanted to see him lose that last shred of control, for that final thread to snap.
Blind, savage desire rocking my body, I moved with him, synching to his rhythm. Nero’s shoulders locked up, his muscles tensing as he gripped me tightly, pulling me up to meet him. His whole body shook, and he groaned deeply into my mouth. Like a storm of fire and lightning, ecstasy crashed through me again and again, devouring me.
When my eyes could focus again, I looked around at the ruins of the bed we lay on. The canopy beams were broken, the bed curtains drooping.
“We destroyed your beautiful designer emperor bed,” I said, breathless, my heart still pounding hard in my ears.
“It won’t be the last time,” Nero said with a self-satisfied smirk. “Don’t worry about it.” Yawning lazily, he wrapped his body around mine and held me.
I snorted. “I love you, Nero Windstriker.”
“Of course you do,” he said with even more smugness, kissing my neck.
I laughed again. Then I closed my eyes and fell asleep in his arms.
When I woke up, Nero was still lying beside me. I held him close, stroking my hand across his, so afraid that I was going to wake up at any moment and find this had all been nothing but a Nectar-induced dream. And that Nero was still missing.
I’m here, Nero spoke inside my mind. This is real.
If this were a dream, you’d say exactly that.
His lips brushed my shoulder. “I heard about your encounter with the Pioneers. You get into all kinds of trouble without me.”
I snatched hold of his hand and kissed his fingertips. “I get into even more trouble with you, angel.”
Nero’s laugh rumbled against my back.
I turned to look over my shoulder at him. The way he was looking at me was simply breathtaking. It was the glow in his eyes, the love in them. I could scarcely believe that this was all real. Just a year ago, I’d been living on the Frontier of civilization, hunting escaped convicts. Now I was a soldier of the sixth level in the gods’ army and the lover of an angel.
Tears pooled in my eyes, my heart swelling. Nero wiped the tears from my face, watching me closely, silently.
His gaze was so intense, so…world-shattering. Yes, that was the word. He’d changed my whole life.
“Penny for your thoughts?” I said, succumbing to my desperate need to fill the silence, to know what he was thinking.
Nero looked me over, his hand tracing the curvature of my hip. “Your magic is so strong now. With each level that you gain, your magic magnifies. It’s intense, like nothing I’ve ever felt before. It is not a single strand or a single flavor or scent of magic. It’s not light or dark. It’s a rich, complex blend of both light and dark magic.”
“So you want to eat me?” I teased him.
“Each and every moment of every day,” he said solemnly, silver and gold swirls glowing inside his emerald eyes.
My heart jumped a beat. “Ronan paid me a visit while you were gone.”
The glow faded from his eyes, and they went hard. “Oh?”
“He talked to me about magic and counter magic. It was his potion that helped me build up my telekinetic resistance.”
“Be careful with Ronan,” Nero cautioned me. “He might be our ally, but he is still a god.”
“Oh, I don’t trust him that much.” I paused, then added, “I talked to Jace too.”
Nero continued to stroke his hand up and down my arm. “Did you?” He sounded perfectly calm, like a tiger right before it pounced and tore you to shreds.
“Jace told me how his family has been trying for centuries to create offspring of perfectly balanced magical potential. Basically, they want all the magic without any of the counter magic.”
He snorted. “They have certainly been trying. But sometimes the less you try, the better things turn out.”
I wondered if he was thinking about his own parents, who had married for love rather than for duty—and had become the only two angels to ever have a child together.
I glanced back, smiling. “Well, I think you turned out all right.”
His brows arched. “All right?” he repeated, as though offended.
“Spectacularly then,” I amended.
He nodded. “Better.”
Then he fell oddly quiet. His hand stroked my side absentmindedly, but his eyes were drifting. His mind was a million miles away.
“Where are you, Nero?” I asked him.
He met my gaze. “It’s been a long few days.”
I saw the darkness in his eyes, the guilt. His people had died on the Memphis mission. But it wasn’t just guilt that I saw in him; it was anger and hunger for revenge against the people who’d engineered the massacre. The Pioneers.
Unfortunately, the Legion Interrogators had gotten nothing useful from the prisoners we’d captured at Hardwicke’s fortress. We didn’t know who the Pioneers were, where they were, or what their end game was. That had left Nero with an enemy he longed to strike back against, but as it stood now, he had nothing to strike at but empty air. The Pioneers were nowhere and they were nothing. They were phantoms you couldn’t see or hit.
“Gin and Tessa are among the kidnapped people still missing,” I said.
My words drew him out of his own mind. “Frankly, I’m surprised Colonel Fireswift promoted you instead of locking you up as a potential traitor.”
“Jace wanted to lock me up.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told him I wasn’t going to turn against the Legion. What I was going to do is hunt down the Pioneers and make them pay for everything they’ve done.”
“You must have been convincing.”
“You know, I really was,” I said. “It didn’t hurt that I put a little magic behind my speech.”
“Cheating again, Pandora?”
“Simply using the resources at my disposal,” I countered.
“Good,” he said, his eyes twinkling with approval. “But grand speeches aside, Leda, you need to be prepared for the possibility that the Pioneers will try to use you. They might dangle your sisters’ lives in front of you in exchange for your cooperation.”
“The Pioneers won’t kill Tessa and Gin. They didn’t take my sisters so they could control me. They took them for their magic.”
Surprise flashed in Nero’s eyes. Apparently, he hadn’t realized they had magic either.
“What kind of magic do they possess?” he asked me.