The Warrior King (Inferno Rising #3) - Abigail Owen Page 0,31

pointed out, stung by his words, his sudden rejection that left her colder than the stone gargoyles outside.

Samael shut his eyes, hiding the flames still dancing there and casting them both into more shadow. “One more dark mark against you as far as my clan is concerned.”

Meira reached for her power, needing to shut down her emotions this time. Not his, because he’d already walled them back up. Cold. Remote.

Vincent chose that moment to leap in through her window, his hooves clacking on the stone flooring. With a happy sound, he jumped up between her and Samael and lay down, like a puppy. Gargoyles spent the long, cold nights in their stone form on the parapets of the castle, and Vincent preferred sleeping somewhere warmer. No doubt he’d missed her the last few months.

“Are you kidding me?” Samael muttered, only to get a cold nose in the armpit for the effort.

Meira, meanwhile, absently patted the goat’s long, wiry fur. She had no idea what had just happened before Vincent showed up, but she did know Samael did nothing without a reason. “Why are you trying to scare me?”

He eyed her over the goat’s head. “Because your trust is too easily given. You aren’t scared enough.”

Another laugh punched from her, this one, though, edged in disbelief.

Despite a kiss that had reached into her soul and touched the essence of who she was, this man didn’t know her at all.

She rolled away from him, her back up against Vincent’s warm, fuzzy body, and closed her eyes. “You’re wrong,” she said quietly. “I’m always afraid.”

Chapter Seven

Samael stood before the massive, gilded mirror, currently reflecting his and Meira’s forms in her bedroom in the gargoyle castle. “Are you certain of this?”

In the reflection, he slid his gaze to the woman standing beside him. The woman who had snored softly in his bed all night. Technically her bed. The woman whose scents of smoke and jasmine lingered on his skin still, leaving him aching and empty.

He’d woken to find her using his chest as a pillow, her bright curls spread across him in soft waves. He couldn’t let himself think about the sweet blush that had stained her cheeks when he’d shifted positions and woken her. Or the way the innocent trust in her eyes darkened to embarrassment, not the wariness he’d expected, as she’d backed away. The ache would only get worse and his dragon louder.

Seven hells, that conversation last night. That kiss. The unexpectedness of it all. Of the way he’d opened up, even a little. But so had she. Of comfort given and taken. But also the frustration with her determination to look at the world—at him—through that innocent prism. Her trust might just get them both killed.

Speaking of which, how Meira had talked him into this latest plan, he wasn’t entirely sure. She’d spent the entire morning on that tablet of hers, pulling up schematics and possible places the real Gorgon might have been taken, he discovered, using coded analytics to determine the most likely places and the highest probability of success to get him out of each.

Then she’d walked him through all of it systematically. The woman truly was an enigma, all logical calculations with her computers, a side of her he was only just now getting to see, but then she led with her heart in every other way. And he’d agreed to her suggested plan. As though he, like the rest of the world, just couldn’t say no to her, and she happily wandered through life with that power in her pocket.

She met his gaze, and something flickered in those ever-changing eyes that he didn’t catch. “With only one exception, no one has ever seen me in the mirrors when I didn’t want them to.”

He knew exactly the exception she was talking about. Him.

I’m the only one to have seen her?

Fuck. One more nail in his coffin, because the longer he spent with this woman, the more a certain knowledge settled deep within his core, bone-deep, soul true. Inside him, his dragon slashed his tail back and forth, impatient for Samael to act on what he knew.

But now was not the time. There might never be a time.

“That wasn’t a slip on your part?” he asked, desperate for any alternate explanation.

“I don’t think so.”

“And you’re sure about this?” he asked again, waving a hand at the mirror.

“I can’t make any guarantees,” she said slowly.

They had already spent a decent portion of the morning debating what their next steps