Page 73 of Angel's Vengeance

He tried damn hard to find the kernels of betrayal, the telltale signs of off-color questions or coming and going at odd hours.

And then shame, hot and defacing, rose up in his gut when he found none.

“Holy shit.”Rhode stumbled back against the nearest tree trunk both wide and alive enough to support him as the reality of the past few weeks walloped him with the steel-toed end of his size-fifteen boot.

Hehad exhibited all those things.The accusatory javelins he’d constantly heaved at her.The anger.Pawning her off on other people.Downright abandoning her, leaving her alone at every occasion from meals with his family to this very arboretum.

And what had she done in retribution?

Comforted him.Sought him out when the warrior in him wanted to be alone while the prisoner of war inside his head screamed for companionship.Warmed his bed even though he’d given her very few reasons to return to it.

Then his mind stopped whirling long enough to break down on the exit ramp of their earlier conversation.He’d given her very few reasons to returnperiod.So she wasn’t.

“I’ve been such a fucking asshole.”

Iron nodded.“Yup.”

“And she’s leaving,” he breathed out, hating the panic that clutched his heart.

“Yeah,” Chrome replied, leaning forward on his hips and smiling his trademark shit-eating grin.“So what are you going to do about it?”

Rhode’s wings were out and connecting with the nearest thermal before the sentinels’ booming laughs shook any more snow from the trees.

Chapter35

Five minutes inside the apartment and already Neela had come to actively despise the color beige.It shouldn’t have been that surprising.If such a neutral snoozefest of a color had actually existed on any mortal color wheel, beige was about as opposite as one could get from the preferred neon green and hot pink of her favorite twinkle lights.

Which, she was disheartened to realize, she’d left in the angels’ den, because being the only female charmer didn’t magically gift her Amazonian height.

Yet another reason on her smorgasbord of arguments to leave.

Rhode had been the one to put the lights up in their—correction,his—living quarters, and since he’d actively avoided everything having to do with her and despite many precarious chair balancing acts on her part, she could never quite reach the damn things.

Sure, she could have bugged one of the other angels for help, but there was something about inviting another man into that space that felt like an even bigger betrayal than the one she’d already committed.It didn’t improve matters that the space had never been hers to begin with.

The apartment she stood in the middle of had a similar thing going for it.Though far larger than her suite of rooms in Cyro’s hideaway, this was also about to be paid for with money that was not her own.The idea left her about as comfortable as a boob in a mammogram machine, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of options, and dammit, Drea and the others knew it, too.So when she’d first floated the idea to everyone over breakfast that she might want to try living on her own for a while, Tung was at the ready with the cash hookup.

While taking the handout wasn’t exactly fun, it had been necessary.Whathadn’tbeen necessary were the pitying glances and soft nods of support that were made oh-so-heavier by the uncertainty lingering around her.

In one desperate fell swoop, she’d simultaneously planted every questionable doubt into the only people who’d ever truly cared for her and also delivered the one thing that was a game changer in their quest to get home: the relic.

So, yeah, the appreciation was there, and she hadn’t survived that long without knowing she needed to ride that gratitude wave for however long the crest stayed above the surface, but the distrust was there as well.Of course it was.What else would have kept Rhode away from his family for so long?And did she blame him?

Neela set her bag, which contained the sum total of every piece of clothing she only sort of owned, down on the gray low-pile carpet, rooted around for the tape measure, and started outlining what her future would look like etched in graphite measurements and leveled markings.Soon, she’d gone through every inch of the place, sketching out the bones of what her new life would eventually fill in.The place wasn’t much.Two bedrooms, a living room connected to a simple dining area, and a standard galley kitchen were all that stood between her and her bedraggled mess of poor choices that refused to give her conscience any moment of peace.

Distractions were one thing, but efficiency, on the other hand, was something else entirely.If she could just mentally picture everything around her filled in, all her shelves, hanging plants, and gauzy curtains, and work at it like a fiend, it would almost—almost—take the sting out of the soul-deep throb that refused to go away when she thought of the space without him.

Rhode.

The one person she’d tried so hard to reach was also the one person who had mastered the art of always stepping out of that reach.

Until then, Neela’s focus had been doing the lion’s share of the lifting, holding her final intact mental fragments by the tits and forcing them into service to measure out the small bathroom’s window size.She was doing semi-okay until she walked by the mirror above the pedestal sink.

Instead of her reflection, all Neela could see was Rhode’s face.The memories of his squared-off jaw tensing as if he had just chewed on a nail.His deeply dark eyes flashing various shades of disapproval and disgust.Firm lips that had devoured her with passion she’d never thought possible slanted in an angry slash of hurt.

When her mind was in a reasoning mood, it would unhelpfully point out the number of times she’d tried to tell him about how she’d hoped to save him from his torment, from both of their torments ...along with the number of times she’d shit the bed on that particular goal thanks to Cyro’s little public revelation.

The resulting picture was as ugly as the festering wound twisting her heart into some petrified mass that even the most astute mortal paleontologist would have a hard time identifying as belonging to a hominid.