Guild Hunter 02 - Angels' Flight

on my tongue—I’ve known him but a fragment of time, and yet I’m certain if I accept his suit, it will destroy a part of me when he leaves.”
     
    Keir reached forward to tuck her hair behind her ear. “We’re all a little broken.” Quiet. Potent. “No one goes through life with a whole heart.” His eyes, full of wisdom too profound to belong to a man who was only three hundred years her senior, told her he saw her soul, tasted the salt of her loneliness.
     
    But what even Keir’s eyes couldn’t see, she thought as she walked out of the library, Jason a silent shadow by her side, was that her heart wasn’t whole. It had broken long, long ago—the first time she’d looked up at the sky and realized it was forever out of her reach. The courage it was taking for her to reach out again was a tight rawness in her chest, serrated at the edges by the remnants of a thousand shattered dreams.
     
    G alen put both vampires on the ground using a fury of kicks and hard whacks with the flat of his blade. &201C;You made the same mistake twice,” he said, waiting only until their eyes focused after the stinging slap of the blade. “I gave you a warning.” Second warnings didn’t exist in his world.
    Struggling to their feet, the two nodded. One wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. But neither demurred when he demanded they go through the exercise again. This time, they were so busy trying not to make the first mistake, they made adifferent one. Realizing both males were exhausted, he pulled his hits and called a halt. “Go,” he said. “Work on your own and against each other tomorrow. Day after, we’ll spar once more.”
     
    The younger vampire hesitated. “We want to get better.” His partner nodded.
     
    Impressed the two hadn’t made a run for it after the beating he’d given them, he forced himself to speak past the anger that was a violent storm in his body. “You will. I want you to go through the steps I showed you at the start again and again until the movements are second nature.” Galen had spent countless hours doing drills, knew their value. “Part of combat is being able to react without thought—you need to train your muscles to remember.”
     
    The vampires left after asking several intelligent questions, determination writ large on their faces. Ignoring his audience as he had since she’d entered in an elegance of cool yellow, he picked up his broadsword and began to go through a complicated routine that would’ve left his opponents in tiny pieces in the blink of an eye. People often misjudged his speed because he looked big and heavy. In truth, the only one of Raphael’s people who might be faster, he thought, was Illium.
     
    “I’ll have a class of disappointed babes if you force me to wait any longer.” Her voice was quiet, but it tore through the air of the salle, nails on his skin.
     
    “Say what you have to and leave.” He forced himself to slow his movements so he could hear her past the whipping cut of the blade.
     
    Silence.
     
    If she thought he’d halt for her, she was very wrong.
     
    “So”—a soft murmur—“this is the flip side to your determination and loyalty. Utter, obdurate stubbornness.” A rippling laugh. “I’m rather glad to find you have a flaw.”
     
    Galen clenched his jaw because she was right. He
was
stubborn, a tenacity he’d made into an asset, but one that had often gotten him into trouble as a child. And he did have a tendency to hold on to his anger, but he was justified here. Jessamy had allowed him to taste her lips, allowed him to believe he might court her, when she belonged to another man.
     
    Halting with the edge of the blade a hairbreadth from her neck, he growled, “That was a singularly stupid thing to do.” Coming up behind him was never a good idea.
     
    Neither fear nor apology in eyes of lush brown he’d wanted to see soft and hazy in his bed. “I know you heard me.”
     
    He lowered the blade, put distance between them, the warm, earthy scent of her threatening to compromise his honor all over again. “What is it you wish to say, Lady Jessamy?”
     
    Jessamy’s heart thudded at the naked fury Galen’s face. All heavy muscle and gleaming skin, he made her think thoughts that were not the least bit civilized. And fear… yes, it lingered, but not of him. Of this, what she was about to do. It might well go down as the worst mistake of her life, but she knew there was no other choice. Not when it