“I never went to school. I needed to work my family’s farm, a small place outside the old Paris wall. Goats, pigs, chickens. A couple of cows.” Luc came down beside her, the headboard creaking against his weight. She tried to picture him tending farm animals. Tried to imagine what his parents or sister might have looked like. People from so long ago. Dead for centuries. And yet, here Luc still was.
“I taught myself to read, but that wasn’t until after,” he said.
After. If anyone had a clear-cut before and after, it was a gargoyle.
“Do you like to read?” she asked. Luc’s eyes followed the motion of her lips.
“Not as much as I like doing this,” he answered, and to stop her from speaking again, Luc cupped her chin and ran his thumb along her lips.
Ingrid lay still against the pillows, uncertain. Barely breathing. What did Luc intend? Her mind ran wild with ideas, all of which she wanted. When Luc reached for the folds of her creamy blue skirt, he hovered over the silk, as if afraid to touch her.
He took a long moment to run his eyes down the length of her body, and then his hand settled lightly on her leg. His palm barely ruffled the silk at first, but as he traveled from her thigh to the arc of her hip, he grew bold. He angled her toward him and wrapped his arm around the small of her back, pulling her closer.
Ingrid flattened her palms against Luc’s chest, her head tucked into the curve of his neck. His skin was still smooth and white, without a single patch of obsidian. He was tense, though, his breathing ragged. But they were still touching. Lying beside one another.
“It’s okay if this is all it can be,” she whispered.
He buried his nose and mouth in her hair, his breath hot against the crown of her head. “I want more. You do, too.”
Ingrid closed her eyes and pressed a kiss to Luc’s neck. His skin was warm and he smelled of clean cedar. “How much more?” she asked.
His laughter gusted against her scalp. He pulled back until his face was over hers. “All of you.”
Ingrid laughed, trying hard not to blush. “I meant how much more here? Now. Before you change.”
“Let’s find out,” he whispered. Luc lowered his mouth to hers. She breathed him in, wishing they could stay like this for as long as they wanted.
“They won’t forgive me for this,” Luc whispered, his mouth still brushing against hers.
Ingrid froze stone-cold beneath him. With an awkward slap of her hands against his chest, she shoved Luc away and covered her throbbing lips. Oh, how stupid! How unbelievably reckless.
“I’m so sorry,” she said through her trembling fingers. “I forgot where we were. Lennier …” The window. She rolled out from underneath Luc and off the bed, landing behind the four-poster.
They were on gargoyle common grounds. They could have been seen.
Luc followed her off the bed, shaking his head. “I didn’t mean them. Lennier left a few minutes ago. There’s no one here. I would have felt them.” He tapped the back of his neck, just below his skull. He could feel the presence of other gargoyles?
“I meant the Order,” he went on. “They know everything I do. Everything I feel.”
His body had tensed, the muscles along his jaw rippling with some hidden effort. He must have been trying not to shift.
“What will they do?” Ingrid asked. They were angels. Their punishment couldn’t possibly be as bad as the violent death the Dispossessed would order.
Luc shook his head again and clenched his eyes shut as a tremor rippled through him. “I don’t know. Irindi warned me—”
His voice broke into a shriek. Luc’s eyes flew open, alert and focused. “Your father.”
“What do you—” Ingrid stopped as Luc kicked off his boots and tore at his shirt, buttons popping off and spinning to the floor.
He shot up toward the ceiling, the muscles beneath his creamy skin bulging, his shoulders broadening; jet scales quilted his skin, clambering like vines up his neck, along his face, and to the crown of his head, where his ears had sharpened into clipped points.
She understood now. Something was happening to her father.
Ingrid didn’t turn away as she usually did. She watched with determined bravery as Luc transformed into a sexless, scaled monster even before his trousers had hit the floor.
Ingrid went for the balcony door and threw it open a bare second before he could smash through it. Luc’s wings unfurled and he soared into the sky, a black stamp against the bleak clouds.
And then he was gone.
Oh God. Papa. Ingrid sat on the edge of the bed, the balcony door still open. Waiting until nightfall had been a mistake.
She couldn’t stay in this room another second.
The dim hallway seemed to tip side to side as she ran down it, into the spare, depressing dining room that no one ever ate in. The receiving room was empty, but even if Lennier with his crazy, long white hair had been inside, she would have surged right past him.
The peeling wallpaper along the corridor and the faded carpet in the stairwell blurred as she ran. She passed the dead cat in the downstairs corridor without flinching as she had the first time, then bolted through the dingy ballroom, toward the open doors, and into the courtyard.