Instinct had her stepping out to meet the leader of Raphael’s Seven in the corridor. The vampire with his chocolate-dark eyes and black hair was dressed in what looked like a ten-thousand-dol ar suit from some fancy store like Zegna’s, the ensemble black on black with an amber-colored tie that threw the tanned color of his skin into sharp relief. Except as she knew al too wel , that color wasn’t a tan.
“I heard,” he said when she reached him, and for once, his voice carried no hint of the double-edged blade of sex. He sounded as she’d once imagined him—a battle-hardened warrior with scimitar in hand, ancient runes carved onto the weapon’s very surface. His scent, too, she realized, was being held in fierce check.
He spoke again before she could say a word. “You need to return to the Tower.”
Elena scowled—the day she let Dmitri give her orders was the day ice-skating became a regular activity in hel . Part of it was simple contrariness because he’d made it crystal clear he considered her a weakness in Raphael’s armor, but part of it was self-preservation. Because the instant Dmitri decided she wasn’t only a weakness, but actual y weak, he’d stop fencing with her and come at her ful tilt.
Raphael would kil him for it, but as Dmitri had once said to her, she’d stil be dead. So she folded her arms, braced her legs. “The second body could
—”
He sliced out a hand, cutting off her words. “Raphael isn’t acting right.”
Their eyes met in dangerous understanding. “Has he gone Quiet?” The terrifying emotionless state that had once turned Raphael into a monster, driven her to shoot him in violent self-defense, scared Elena even now.
“No.” A single precise word. “But he is not acting himself.”
“No,” Elena agreed. Raphael was an archangel, could be merciless in his punishments, but he was also piercingly intel igent. He shouldn’t have needed her to remind him that they needed to know why Ignatius had done what he had. That was something the Raphael she knew would’ve considered long before it got to the point of execution—but today, it was as if he’d been driven by untrammeled rage. “Have you seen him like this before?”
“No. And I have known him near to a thousand years.”
Elena sucked in a breath. In spite of the fact that he was almost impossibly good at hiding the sheer power within him, she’d known Dmitri was old, but even then, she hadn’t come close to guessing the depth of his age. “Does this place have a balcony I can use as a launch point?” She’d pursue the mystery of Dmitri later. Right now, she had to go to her archangel.
“A smal one upstairs. If you stand on the railing, you should have just enough lift to rise.” He pointed to a staircase she hadn’t seen til that moment. “I’l organize a search for the second body,” he said as she took the first step up, “ensure the medical examiner knows you’l need to look at the remains.”
Elena’s hand clenched on the balustrade. The lives of two innocent families were about to be smashed to splinters that would never again form a complete whole. “My sisters?” she asked, fighting her mind’s attempt to shove her back into the horror-fil ed past of another family, one that had broken forever in a smal suburban kitchen almost two decades in the past. “The other girls?”
“Being sent home. Your father dispatched a car to pick up your sisters—they left fifteen minutes ago.” Stil no sarcasm, no attempt to unsettle her with that scent of his.
Dmitri’s restraint worried her more than anything he could’ve said.
Leaving him the task of locating the second body, she made her way to what proved to be some kind of an art studio surrounded by huge windows designed to catch endless sunlight. But there was no luxuriant warmth, no shimmering gold today. The world outside was a sul en gray, the atmosphere suffocating in its heaviness.
Shaking off the thought that nothing could fly in such leaden air, she made her way onto the attached balcony. Dmitri had told the unadulterated truth when he’d termed it smal . It took al of her balancing skil s to get herself onto the tiny railing, and even then, the ground looked far too close.
Sucking in a breath, she flared out her wings ... and dove.
The ground rushed up at blazing speed as she beat her wings hard and fast, muscles straining to painful levels. In the end, she could’ve skimmed her fingers over the grass, but she got airborne, pul ing herself up until she was high enough to ride the air currents. Her shoulders ached from the unaccustomed amount and type of flying she’d done today, but not enough to make her worry about fal ing out of the sky.
Having caught her breath on a fast current, she stroked her way even higher—so that no one looking up would immediately recognize the unusual colors of her wings. The wind whipped her hair off her face, threatened to lay frost on her skin. The cold distracted her enough that she almost ignored the fleeting glimpse of black high above.
Jason.