so huge, she loved each one of her charges as if that child was her own. “You decided to stay, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t like Jessamy crying—she was always nice to me, even when I tore up her books. I put my hand in hers and we went for a walk to a place with gardens, where she took a seat on a stone bench, put me on her lap, and started to teach me what I needed to know so I could live in the world without people being angry with me all the time.”
The ache inside Andromeda, it was so deep now, for the boy he’d been. “How long did Jessamy teach you such things?”
“For years.” Naasir’s tone held a deep vein of affection. “It took me time to learn but Jessamy is patient. Every afternoon, we’d sit in the garden and she’d teach me things the other children already knew. Like how I shouldn’t growl at people even if I didn’t like them, and how bunnies and other animals in the Refuge weren’t for eating.”
He rubbed his fingers over her hip. “Dmitri taught me, too, but Dmitri didn’t care if I ate pet bunnies or if I jumped out at him so he wasn’t the best teacher on the topic.”
Andromeda could well imagine that Raphael’s deadly second had a far more laissez-faire attitude toward etiquette and behavior. When you were that dangerous, you made your own rules. “And now you can be so civilized it’s scary.”
A shrug. “I put on a different skin when it’s necessary. Dmitri taught me that—he said I didn’t have to change, but that my life would be easier if I could fool people into thinking I had at times.”
“I’m so happy you never wear any skin but your own around me,” Andromeda whispered, her heart wide open.
Silver eyes locked with hers. “I’ll always be Naasir with you,” he promised solemnly, then grinned. “Even if you ask me to act civilized for a minute.”
She groaned and pretended to beat at him with her free hand. “You’re never going to let me forget I said that, are you?”
“Maybe if you tell me a story of your childhood.”
* * *
Naasir glimpsed many expressions move across Andromeda’s face in a matter of split seconds. He didn’t catch all of them, but he saw pain, anger, shame, and finally joy.
None of it surprised him; immortality meant many experiences. Though the shame wasn’t a usual thing—but then, Andromeda wasn’t a hardened immortal. Her heart was tender. She probably felt shame for a transgression others would’ve long forgotten.
“I never went to the Refuge school,” she began. “I didn’t see the Refuge at all until I flew there myself just after my seventy-fifth birthday.”
“Seventy-five is not full-grown for an angel.” At that age, she would’ve been close to a fifteen-year-old human teenager. “You flew to the Refuge alone?”
“Yes.” Her expression altered, the golden bursts in her eyes suddenly dark. “My body had started to curve early, my breasts lush. I no longer appeared the child I was and a number of my parents’ guests were starting to look at me in a way that was distinctly predatory and sexual.”
Naasir felt his claws prick at his skin, fought to keep them sheathed.
“I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew as a princess of the court, I was probably safe, but the look in the guests’ eyes . . . it made me feel dirty and small. And the way my parents and their friends brutally tortured others for pleasure . . .” She shook her head, stark echoes of fear and shock in her expression. “I told them my plans, then flew out.”
A shuddering breath. “I think Mother and Father expected me to give up and return home. When I didn’t, they washed their hands of me.”
Andromeda was lying. Not about her flight to the Refuge, but about another part of her story. It made him want to bare his teeth and demand she tell the truth, but he’d do that later, when she didn’t appear so fragile. “Who did you play with when you lived with your parents?”
“The animals.” Joy chased out the shadows. “Once, while I was having dinner in my nursery, a baby giraffe poked his head in the window and ate the fruit right off my plate.”
Naasir grinned. “Truth?”
She nodded. “It came back, too. I used to make up a plate especially for him until my nanny caught me—and even after that, I waited until she wasn’t paying attention