Total pages in book: 148
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139178 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Then he was gone, a deadly warrior who had chosen to honor her with his fidelity for a single short year.
Determined to be worthy of his trust and to earn that of her son, she straightened her spine and put her hands behind her back, gripping the wrist of one with the fingers of the other as the desert air hung unmoving. Because her son was a man, and she was a stranger to him.
She couldn’t simply embrace him, couldn’t simply expect him to love her. As evidenced by Aegaeon, to expect such was foolishness in the extreme. Foolishness that meant she could lose Gavi…for she could call him that in the privacy of her own mind and it was no trespass.
An owl, its feathers as white as snow, winged its way to look into her eyes with orbs of gold.
“Lady Cassandra,” Michaela said. “I thank you with all I am for this second chance.” She held that gaze, steel in her next words. “But I am not your chick to look after anymore.” If Cassandra had a flaw, it was that she was too protective of those she claimed. “This is my time, my rule, my decisions.”
Where before, it was arrogance that would’ve dripped from her words, today, it was a firmness coated in respect. “I am an archangel.”
Michaela, Archangel of Art and Grace. That ancient, familiar voice, full of an excruciating weight of history.
Michaela’s throat tightened. She had never held that title. She’d been called the Archangel of Beauty or Muse Most Beautiful, and it had spoken to her vanity. But this…“I will earn the title you have bestowed upon me,” she promised. “I will be better than I was. I will make my son proud to claim me as his mother. This I vow.”
No more words from Cassandra.
The owl spiraled up into the darkening evening sky still brushed with streamers of orange-gold. It vanished from sight even as she spotted a shadow on the horizon, one that soon formed into the silhouette of an angel against the last of the sun’s glow.
Tears threatened but she fought them back, for Gavriel, son of Michaela, grandson of Gavriel past, would not wish to meet the stranger that she had become to him while she was awash in emotion that he couldn’t reciprocate.
He might never love her.
So be it.
He lived. He breathed. He was respected enough to be in the inner court of an archangel.
Her son was a glory.
So it was that when he landed on the roof, she was able to look at him with dry eyes despite the tumult in her heart. He had skin the same mocha shade as hers and wings identical to her own, his mahogany-colored hair holding loose curls. His jawline was as perfect as his father’s, and his eyes a tawny shade of brown intermixed with gold that gave him the look of a jungle cat.
Her stomach tightened. For those striking eyes were his father’s, too.
Her initial instinct had been to execute her lover, so that he could never challenge her for her child’s love, but then she’d decided that there was no need. He was a frippery, pretty and vacuous, and nothing worthy of the son he’d helped create. He didn’t even know that he’d managed to sire a babe on an archangel…but at least he was alive.
Gavriel would never look upon her as the executioner of his blood father. And should he ever wish to meet that father, she would give him the man’s name and he could track him down to whichever pleasure den the pretty frippery currently called home.
How extraordinary that this man who was respected both as a warrior and a scholar—she’d heard it in Andreas’s voice, in Illium’s—would come from her with her vanity and her cruelty and her petty intrigues, and that shallow and vapid angelic courtier whose primary interest was himself?
“Well met, Gavriel.” Her throat ached with the effort it took to keep her emotions in check. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“Archangel Michaela,” he said with a respectful bow, and it made her flinch inside, for that was not how she would have him greet her…but he was a man, and she must do as Keir had advised and treat him as a man.
“I admit I had my doubts about the soundness of the idea,” he said in a voice resonant and even. “But I have friends who will never get to meet their mothers again, and they advised me that such a chance was not one I should squander.”
“Wise friends,” Michaela said, grateful to those unknown strangers.
Gavriel stared at her with an intensity that would’ve been an insult in any other circumstance. “I see pieces of myself in you,” he said at long last, a hitch in his voice. “I have never seen pieces of myself in another before.” The merest hint of a smile. “Though I suppose it is the other way around, isn’t it? My skin, my hair, the shape of my eyes, they are pieces of you.”