Archangel's Storm

others. However, she didn’t repeat the punishment once his wings grew back . . . and I think she regretted ever having done it.”
    Love, Jason thought, could be the most debilitating of weaknesses.
    “Jason, I’m sorry I scared you, son. I did not mean to rag
e.”
    Walking further down the balcony, he took in the windows along the inner wall, each created with ten red and green pieces of stained glass. The individual pieces were squares roughly the size of his palm, the effect delicate against the stone of the palace. The glass was echoed in the doors that stood open to reveal a bedroom that appeared to occupy most of the second level, its inner walls gently curved to embrace the central core of the palace.
    A magnificent chandelier poured muted, flickering light from the ceiling. Its crystal sconces cradled a thousand candles, many of which had burned down, else the light would’ve been sharper, brighter. “Eris didn’t care for modern things?” he asked the woman who’d entered the bedroom from the corridor.
    “No, he just preferred candlelight in his private chambers.”
    Which meant the room downstairs had acted as his receiving area. “How many guests was he permitted?”
    “It depended on Neha’s mood.” An answer that said much about Eris’s existence. “Never any women aside from Neha and myself. Even the servants who worked in this palace were all male.”
    For a man who had been a favorite of women, it would’ve been akin to having a limb amputated. “Do you think the rule was observed?”
    “I think Eris did not have any wish to anger Neha further.”
    That didn’t answer the question, and the way Mahiya had subtly angled her face away from the light as she spoke told him she knew more than she was saying.
    The stealthy hunter in Jason rose to full wakefulness.
     

6
    “A leopard, as they say,” he murmured, his mind working at the question of Mahiya’s true loyalties, at whose secrets she kept, “does not change its spots.” Eris had never been good at self-denial where women and sex were concerned.
    An adoring conquest looking up into the face of the golden god who was Neha’s consort, her eyes blazing with shy desire.
    Jason had witnessed that particular scene approximately a century and a half after Neha’s marriage, during a ball given by the archangel Uram. At the time, he’d put Eris’s responding smile of sensual invitation down to male vanity, never considering the other man might ever actually
accept
such an invitation.
    Yet Eris had needed to have his ego stroked enough that he’d fathered a child upon the sister of the woman he’d sworn to honor. Jason didn’t fool himself that Eris had loved Nivriti—the man had been a narcissist, had cared about no one but himself.
And
in spite of his trespass, he had survived. What was there to stop such a man from taking another risk and seducing a lover within the walls of his luxurious prison?
    “Tell me,” he said, pinning Mahiya with his gaze, “Did Eris have a lover?”
    Mahiya had avoided his earlier question, having realized far too late that she’d betrayed a knowledge and a curiosity beyond the woman she was meant to be. Her only defense for the unprecedented failure was surprise—it had been so very startling to speak to someone who watched her without judgment or pity, and who did not divine
a lack of understanding simply because she chose to keep her silence . . . but of course he wouldn’t. Jason was a man who guarded his words, yet she had not a single doubt that his intelligence was a piercing arrow.
    Now, looking into eyes a deep, impenetrable brown that stripped her to the bone, she realized it was too late to put the mask back on.
    Jason had already seen her.
    There was a strange exhilaration in showing her true face. “I have no proof of a new infidelity,” she said, “but there were times of late that I caught a certain musk in the air.” A woman should not know such things about her father, but Eris’s only claim to paternity had been through their shared blood.
    “You didn’t tell Neha.” It wasn’t a question.
    Mahiya held that dark blade of a gaze. “I would not be the messenger who bears such tidings.” Neha would’ve struck her down, ended her for it. “You’re welcome to attempt it.”
    His response to the challenge was a calm “Let us see if it proves necessary.”
    The exhilaration in her bloodstream slowly turned to ice as she watched him explore every inch of the