Free Archangel's Consort by Nalini Singh Page A

was right. Lijuan was unpredictable—she might decide to take the presence of Raphael’s “pet” as an insult. “Do it fast. Don’t let her get her hooks into you.”
    A nod that sent his hair sliding across his forehead in a wash of gleaming midnight. “You asked me once what you should call me.”
    Elena scowled. “I think you said something like ‘master,’ but I’ve decided I had to be hearing things.”
    “What would you like to call me?”
    That made her pause. “Husband” was too human, “partner” factually wrong for a being as powerful as an archangel, “mate” . . . perhaps. But none of it was quite right. “Mine,” she said at last.
    He blinked, and when he raised his lashes again, the blue was liquid fire. Yes, that will do. “But for public consumption, you are my consort.”
    “Consort,” she murmured, tasting the word, feeling its shape. “Yes, that fits.” A consort was more than a lover, more than a wife. She was ... someone with whom an archangel could discuss the darkest of secrets, someone he could trust to speak only the truth, even if it wasn’t something he wanted to hear. “If that crazy-ass bitch tries anything,” she said, referring to Lijuan, “and being in my mind would help anchor you, then do it.”
    Raphael closed his hand over her bare shoulder, stroking to curve his fingers around her nape, his thumb playing over her pulse. “You fight so hard for your independence, and yet you would give me such entry?”
    “I know you won’t abuse it.” Not now, not when he knew how very important it was to her that her mind be her own.
    “I thank you for the offer, Elena.” It was an oddly formal statement, almost as if he was making a vow, his expression so intent she could do nothing but wrap her arms around him. The sheet slid to the floor at the same moment that he moved his free hand down her spine to her lower back, pressing her against him, his wings rising to curve slightly around her.
    “The painting,” she said, stealing a moment to simply be with her archangel. “When was it done?”
    “During the time you trained with Galen.” He answered her next question before she could ask it. “It is Aodhan’s work, done at my request.”
    Elena thought of the angel with his eyes of shattered glass and wings that glittered diamond bright in the sun. “I never saw him.”
    “He is adept at being unseen.”
    “Most men would choose a painting of a nude for the bedroom,” she teased. “You chose a hunter with knives.”
    “You are the only woman allowed in my bedroom, Elena.”
    That she was loved . . . it was wonder enough. That she was loved by this man, it was beyond wonder. And it gave her the will to step back into the darkness. “I need to tell you what I found at the school.”
    He listened in quiet. “You plan to liaise with Dmitri, confirm if they located the second body?”
    “Yes.” Frustrated anger had her fisting her hand against his back. “It wasn’t a coincidence that the vampire picked that school was it, Raphael?”
    His answer destroyed her final ephemeral hopes. “No. It cannot be.”

7
     
    Less than an hour later, Elena found herself at the city morgue, looking down at the heartbreaking evidence of why Ignatius had spilled innocent blood. The girl who lay on the slab had been named Betsy, an old-fashioned name for someone so young. But maybe she’d liked it. Elena would never know. Because Betsy’s throat had been torn out, coloring the bed where she’d gone to lie down a violent crimson.
    They’d found her discarded in the woods not far from the pond, a bare few feet from where Elena had hesitated during the tracking.
    “She was a day student, didn’t have a bed at the school,” Dmitri told her from where he stood on the other side of the body. “Her teacher sent her to the infirmary after she complained of a stomachache, but Betsy’s best friend had a room at the school. It looks like she snuck in there instead. In the