71. WEN

As I take my last breath, something hot and wet catapults out of my depths.

“Ewww.”

The fist in my chest disappears, and a massive breath tears into my suddenly expanding lungs.

When Aela’s light dissipates, I find myself staring up at the girls’ faces. They’re all splattered in blood. My blood.

That’s the mass I felt. Aela’s power had coerced it to coalesce, then to exit my body. All over them.

Sarah and Matt start giggling and hiccuping and hugging me. Jinny wipes her eyes furiously. “I take it back. I don’t prefer you spitting your blood in my eye. I have enough of your blood for an eternity. Never do it again.”

Aela slumps on her back beside me, mumbling, “This was one of the worst things to ever happen to me. Your insides are—disturbing. Never get injured again.”

I nod numbly at both of them, trying to get a grip on everything that just happened.

Even under the Angelscence’s effect, or whatever is happening to them, these girls came to my rescue.

I’m alive, and feeling stronger with every precious breath, thanks to them. All of them.

Then I realize something else. Beyond our group, everything has gone deathly silent and still.

Before this translates in my mind, Cara, who’s been slumped against the forcefield falls back on the ground with a shout.

Does this mean …?

The ground rocks beneath me, and I jackknife sitting up. The first thing my gaze crashes on is Godric.

He has just landed, in his preferred meteoric method. At least this place is built to take far more punishment than human constructions. The total destruction he caused is limited to his immediate vicinity.

I scramble up with Sarah’s and Matt’s help, and feel the ground shaking beneath my unsteady feet, with the repercussions of my latest ordeal, and his still reverberating landing. Swaying, I gape at him as he starts walking, his pace leisurely with intent and menace, his gaze unwavering from me.

Everything else falls away as he approaches, framed by the flaming pyre of the carnage he created, and crowned by the billowing smoke of the lives he snuffed out.

He’s in a far worse condition than when he came for me during Azazel’s attempted Ligare coup. Yet there’s no comparison. There’s no scorched gauntness to his face and physique, no haunted anguish polluting his eyes or darkening his aura. In spite of the plethora of his horrific gouges and scorchings, and the suffering they must be inflicting, it feels as if the damage is infusing him with extra vigor and lethality.

He now looks exactly what I thought him to be the first night he caught me.

When he walked away expecting me to follow him like a dog, I likened him to a god of vengeance leaving a battlefield strewn with the carcasses of those he had dealt his brutal retribution. Later, I thought he wasn’t only Heaven’s enforcer, but a grim reaper. I’ve since thrown the word “god” around.

This had mostly been figures of speech, exaggerations. But as he advances on me in all his gory glory, framed by the nightmarish swathes of his wings, with their runes bleeding into his injuries like rivers of magma, and the formidable expanse of his body decorated in the horror of his enemies’ remains, there’s no hyperbole anymore. It’s a simple, immutable fact.

He is a god.

A god of monsters.

And it terrifies me out of my mind.

Not because I fear him. It’s because I finally and fully understand all his warnings.

I already know I want him. I crave him with a ferocity that spans existence and traverses the void. But if I doubted his reciprocation before, now I see the truth of his condition. I have somehow become the focal point of his desires, his insanities. It’s all there, in the sheer complexity, the devastating intensity of the emotions radiating from him like a solar flare.

I always wondered what he’d be like if he ever lost control.

What terrifies me most is that I’m still wondering. After all this, I know he hasn’t lost it yet. Not even close.

The Godric approaching me like impending doom is still in the first stages of shattering the leash that has been forced on him from birth, what he had endured unimaginable atrocities and unspeakable agony for.

I can’t project what it will be like when it fully snaps. And if I don’t do something to stop his spiral, it will.

He’s close enough now, I can see that his eyes are still mismatched. Their focus on me is tunneled, vehement, as if he doesn’t register the girls’ presence, or care about anything else in existence.

When he’s a dozen feet away, like that first day in the Academy, during Orientation, the leash materializes around my neck and in his hand.

He tightens it enough so that when he tugs, I stumble the remaining distance between us, and he slams me against him with a groan of suffering and satisfaction.

Bending to press open-mouthed kisses to my neck, jaw, cheek, he pours his aroused rumble into my healing ear. I feel it penetrating my brain, my being.

“Miss me?”

I cry out at the same moment shards of glass explode everywhere, along with blood. His blood.

It splatters my face, seeps into the seam of my lips. I struggle not to lap at it like a starving woman, but a few drops still make it into my mouth.

Their effect is immediate. That all-encompassing euphoric clarity and razing hunger.

Before I lose control and jump him, Sarah beats me to it.

Godric stares down at me as if unable to believe it.

I can’t either as I watch her winding herself around him—and tearing at him like a rabid animal.

Before I can draw another breath, he shrugs ever so slightly and sends her falling off him.

As she staggers away, he gazes down at her with one eyebrow raised. “Did you just smash a bottle over my head?”

It’s only then I realize what happened. She did. And she still has the jagged bottle’s neck in her hand.

Before she answers, he seems to forget she’s there, turns to me, plastering me against his bloody hardness, and murmuring, “I hope you enjoyed the lesson. Expect an extensive quiz, later. Now, it’s time for these orgasms I promised, before I was so rudely interrupted?—”

Sarah jumps him again, jamming the bottle neck in his as she screams, “Leave her alone, you monster.”

Godric’s arterial geyser splashes my face and neck and chest and floods my open mouth. Its overwhelming effects pummel through me as everything in my world stops, refusing to process what happened. What Sarah did.

Before I charge him to press my hands on his wound, and scream to Aela for help, Godric swivels away from me, the movement alone swatting Sarah a dozen feet away.

Everything slows down again as she crashes to the ground, and he presses his wound. Relief almost drives me to my knees when it stops spurting. When he removes his hand, he’s already healing, but alarm still almost uproots my heart.

At the way his gaze is now pinned on Sarah.

“That hurt, Cadet Conrad.” I think the whole world bates its breath with me as he frowns, before he adds, “My feelings.” This sounds worse somehow. Then his lips twitch with that macabre levity making it worse still as he looks around to the others. “Cue laughter here. I just made a joke. I have none, of course. Not about any of you insignificant lot.”

Sarah rises to her feet, beginning to glow with that pervasive white light from the Amulet Ceremony and the Transcendence Training incident. “I have feelings about you. I loathe you, you Angelhole.”

Godric’s lips compress and the flames in his eyes die down to an even more disturbing simmer. “I don’t care that you slashed my carotid. But I do care about this. No one else but her calls me that.”

Sarah growls—growls—her eyes going as white as her light. “I despise your fucking nephilim ass, Angelhole. You’re the worst thing that ever happened to Wen, and that’s when she suffered some horrific shit in her life. You humiliate and manipulate and control and abuse her. You toy with her emotions, torment her mind and crush her heart. You made her need you, depend on you, then you left her without a word to go insane, to waste away. Just now, you almost killed her!”

The indifference he’s been regarding her with, has been dissipating with every word. With the last ones it’s blasted away to be replaced by the most frightening expression I’ve ever seen. As if she’s the first thing he has ever hated.

Before I can cry out something, anything to stop this spiraling mess, he turns to me with the banked blaze in his eyes igniting again. “What is she talking about?”

I can’t tell him. I won’t risk him losing his shit if he realizes what he inadvertently did to me.

Before I can think of something to defuse the situation, Jinny snickers, “Your Level Nine hissy fit punctured her lungs, Angelhole. Both of them. She would have drowned in her own blood, inside your cage, if not for me. For us.”

“You’re done hurting her, you sadistic bully,” Sarah hisses, sounding feral as she advances on him again, her light intensifying, feeling like an aura of searing, vengeful love. “I’m going to free her from you. I’m going to kill you!”