Archangel’s Shadows (Guild Hunter #7)(58)
Author: Nalini Singh

Ash pressed a kiss to his chest, searing him through the fabric of his tee. “I can feel the darkness licking at me, whispering ugly, vicious things just out of my hearing. It’s coming.”

“No. I won’t accept this.” More than two hundred years he’d waited for her, and now she was telling him he’d lose her in a heartbeat? No.

“I tracked down my maternal grandmother’s medical records.”

Janvier’s blood turned to ice.

“I never knew her,” Ash said. “My mother told me she died when my mother was twenty-one. What she didn’t tell me is that my grandmother spent fifteen years in a psychiatric facility.”

He shook his head in mute denial, but Ash wasn’t finished.

“It was much harder to track my great-grandmother, but I finally found one of her girlhood friends.” A ragged breath, her body rigid against him, and he knew she was fighting the same rage and pain and screaming sense of loss that had him in its grip. “She told me my great-grandmother hung herself when she was about forty, after ‘the ghosts would not leave her alone’—as they hadn’t her mother.”

He knew what she was trying to tell him, didn’t want to understand it.

“I’m so sorry, Janvier. I should’ve stopped us before—”

“Don’t you say that. Don’t you ever say that.” He crushed her to him. “You were always meant to be mine.” His eyes burned, his chest so painful that it felt as if his heart had burst. “Whether it’s for a year or a century, it doesn’t diminish who and what we are together.”

Ash didn’t fight his hold, the kiss she pressed to the pulse in his neck an agonizing tenderness. “I’m yours.” Her fingers trembled as she curved them around the side of his neck. “Only ever yours.”

He couldn’t speak for a long time, and when he did, he had to see her face. Releasing her so she could sit up, he said, “No more walls, no more distance.” He wanted to shake her for keeping this from him for so long, for protecting him at the cost of the life they could’ve had together. “And never any apologies. Not between us.”

His fierce, beautiful, wild storm of a lover cupped his face in her hands, her own face strong and proud and so damn vibrant it was impossible to imagine her fading into a nightmare twilight. “No walls, no distance.” Raw power in every word. “You’re in my soul, Janvier.”

He wanted to say the same in return but his throat was too thick, too filled with the anger inside him.

Ash wouldn’t let him look away, wouldn’t let him hide his fury. “I want a promise, too.”

“Anything.” He’d split his veins for her, if that was what she wanted.

“If we’re going to do this, we do it full throttle.” The darkness of her eyes caught him, held him. “We live for today, not in mourning for the tomorrow that hasn’t yet arrived, and we don’t allow the rage to drown us.”

Jawbones grinding, he defied her to look out over the water, but if the Hudson held an answer for him, it was mired in the silky dark.

“Janvier.” Fingers weaving through his hair, his Ashblade’s arms around his neck. “I want to play with you as we’ve always played. No rules, no holding back. Don’t treat me as broken. Don’t do that.”

How could he deny her? He’d never been able to deny her anything. “Full throttle,” he promised, and it was the hardest promise he’d ever had to make, the anger inside him wanting to take over his skin. “I’ll show you things that’ll make you laugh in delight, scream in passion, cry for the sheer joy of it.”

Ash smiled in startled happiness at the words he’d first spoken to her on the train platform where they’d shared their first kiss and it was a beam of light piercing the oppressive dark. At that instant, he realized something else critical: his Ash would never permit herself to be imprisoned inside her own mind. She was a hunter, a woman who danced with danger on every job. When she felt the shadows begin to overwhelm her, she’d go out on a hunt one day and she wouldn’t come home, leaving him with memories of a beautiful lover who’d died doing what she loved.

No anguish like what she and her brother suffered as they watched Tanu deteriorate.

No lingering, agonizing loss. Just a clean, sharp cut.

What she didn’t realize was that he’d go with her, making a clean, sharp cut of his own. He’d lived more than two hundred years already, and the best of them, the best of them, had been the four since she’d entered his life.

The idea of going back to an existence where she wasn’t there anymore? He couldn’t do it. He’d never wanted to be a vampire to live forever. He’d done it for what he’d once believed was love, though he’d come to understand it for a false promise. This, this was love. The kind that forever changed a man.

If he survived Ash, he would no longer be the Janvier she knew—he’d be a man without a heart, his buried with her. In time, he’d become like the immortals he so despised, the ones for whom life held no meaning, and who’d attempt any cruelty in an effort to feel again.

No, whatever Ashwini’s life span, it would be his, too.

•   •   •

Ashwini knew that despite the promise he’d demanded from her, Janvier didn’t expect to come up to her apartment that night. He had too much honor to take advantage of her emotional state—but she needed him, wanted to greedily live every instant they had together now that she could go to him open and honest and without secrets.

“I’ll walk you up,” he said after parking his car in the illegal spot out in front of her building.

Taking his keys once they were through the doors, she threw them to the doorman, then dug out a generous tip. “Can you sneak the car into one of the underground parking spaces someone’s not using?” Not having a car of her own, she didn’t pay to keep a space.

“No problem.” Nic winked. “Mrs. Beachum’s in the Hamptons.”

“Thanks, Nic.” Not looking at Janvier, she walked to the elevators.

“Ash—”

“I don’t want to waste any more time.” She looked into the raw intensity of his eyes, allowed him to see her: skittering nerves, hot skin, muscles taut, she was a knot of want and need and ignorance. “I want to live, to kiss you, play with you, love you.”

He closed his eyes, shuddered. “I’m too selfish when it comes to you, cher, to try to convince you otherwise.”