Archangel’s Enigma (Guild Hunter #8)(34)
Author: Nalini Singh

Even as the harsh truth settled in Andromeda’s stomach, she didn’t panic. That would get her nowhere. Once out of the central part of the citadel, she noted the number of guards, tried to pinpoint possible exits she could use, but had to admit the complex was too big and sprawling for her to believe she’d seen even a tenth of it in her explorations.

She tried to imagine what Naasir, renowned for his stealth, would do. He was impossibly beautiful when he moved, an apex predator who feared nothing and no one, and who had a dark, deadly grace.

You have secrets. You wear another skin, too.

Hand fisting against her abdomen, Andromeda fought back a sudden surge of raw emotion. It was silly, foolish. She’d known him for a flicker of time. It shouldn’t matter that she might never again see him, never again play games with him that threatened to unravel her hard-fought shell of civilized discipline.

But it did. It mattered.

Hours after that stabbing instant of loss, terror was a quiet tattoo in her head. Because this citadel was a fortress. She’d tired her feet to throbbing pain without discovering a single avenue of escape. Swallowing past the sour taste of fear and refusing to give up, she was padding down a quiet hallway when she heard it: a low, lyrical humming that caught at her heart, it was so evocative.

She followed the exquisite sound to a set of open doors at the far end of the hallway, knocked softly. “Hello?”

The humming trailed off. “Yes?” A gentle voice.

Entering, Andromeda found herself in a light-filled room decorated with white fabrics and colorful cushions. The angel who looked up at Andromeda from the sofa on which she sat, a sketchpad on her lap and her legs folded under her, had Lijuan’s sharp cheekbones and ice-white hair against cool white skin, though her eyes were a rich obsidian. A tiny beauty spot dotted the delicate skin just below the far edge of her left eye.

You have spots on your face.

The mental echo of Naasir’s growly, fascinated voice snapped her out of her stunned shock. Because this angel’s distinctive features, when added to the arching snow-white wings with bronze primaries that Andromeda could see behind her, made her identity impossible to mistake. “Suyin.”

Lijuan’s niece and one of the greatest architects the world had ever known.

The angel smiled, and it was startling to see such open, kind welcome on a face that could’ve been a duplicate of Lijuan’s but for the color of Suyin’s eyes and the beauty spot. “And who are you, youngling?”

Andromeda supposed she was young in comparison to an angel many thousands of years old. “Andromeda,” she said. “A scholar.”

“Ah.” Returning her eyes to her sketchpad, Suyin motioned her head toward the opposite sofa. “Sit, Andromeda,” she said in the same aged dialect she’d used earlier. “Tell me what you do here.”

Andromeda saw no reason to lie.

Pencil motionless on her sketchpad, Suyin looked at her with sad eyes once she was done. “My aunt will not allow you to leave.”

“I know.” It was no longer Lijuan she saw when she looked at Suyin. The other woman’s own spirit was too bright and too gentle both. “Have you been imprisoned here all this time?” It must’ve felt like living death to an angel who, according to the histories Andromeda had read, had loved to fly the world.

“I was given the choice to Sleep or to die. And in this, I was . . . lucky, for others who helped build this citadel and thus knew its secrets, were all executed.” Sorrow in every part of her as she flipped a page and began to sketch again. “I chose to Sleep, but I wake every few hundred years to see if this prison I built has fallen and I can fly to freedom.” The quiet horror of her pain made Andromeda’s eyes sting. “Yet each time I wake, my aunt is more powerful, more a nightmare.”

Andromeda wanted to trust this woman who appeared to be a fellow captive, but she couldn’t. Not so quickly. Yet she risked asking, “Did you ever try to escape?”

Setting aside her sketchpad, Suyin rose to her feet and turned. Andromeda cried out, one trembling hand rising to her mouth. Suyin was missing most of the lower half of one wing, the exposed muscle and tendon of the bottom edge hot and red.

“I tried to escape the first time I woke,” Suyin said after sitting back down, the faint breathlessness in her voice the only indication of what must be agonizing pain.

She nodded to the crossed swords mounted on the wall behind Andromeda. “The blades used to clip my wings each time I wake.”

Andromeda couldn’t imagine the endless horror. “How are you sane?” she whispered.

“I do not know myself.” Suyin’s fine-boned hand moved over the paper in confident strokes. “Perhaps because I was old enough before my imprisonment that I understand time passes like an inexorable river, bringing change with it.”