Archangel’s Ascension: Chapter 20

Illium stroked up the merest breath, then down. “How’s this?”

Every one of Aodhan’s senses was focused on the skin-to-skin contact, on the slight roughness of Illium’s touch, on the warmth and strength of a hand built to carry a heavy blade in winged combat. So different, he realized, from the hands that had viciously stolen the touch that should’ve been his alone to give.

“The ones who took me,” he found himself saying, “were greedy. Weak. Cruel. You’re not greedy. You’re not weak. And you’re cruel.”

Though Illium’s expression darkened, his jaw clenching until his skin lost blood flow over bone, he didn’t tell Aodhan that this wasn’t the time to bring up his torture. His best friend in all the universe understood that this was no longer a wound to be kept in the dark inside him, where it could fester. It was time he exposed it to the light once and for all, and burned it to cinders.

“I’m nothing like them.” Illium stroked his hip again, infinitely gentle despite his fury. “I’m also alive while those fuckers are dead and erased from existence. Keep that thought in your head anytime the memories try to claw back into you.”

Aodhan gloried in Illium’s anger, in the vibrant life of him. “You know how you fidget with things?” It had become clear to him since Illium’s arrival home that the other man had switched from Kaia’s pendant to using the belt buckle Aodhan had gifted him. Tapping at it when he was in thought, rubbing his thumb down the polished metal at times.

But, aware of how much Illium liked to play small objects through and over his fingers, he planned to make the other man a metal disk perfectly weighted for just such play—while stamping it with their entwined initials.

“You mean like this?” Illium took a small triangular piece out of his pocket with his free hand and played it around and over his fingers, his other hand never breaking skin contact with Aodhan.

Distracted, Aodhan stared at the paint-splattered object. “That’s the broken tip of my palette knife.” He’d snapped the narrow tool in the midst of an intensive painting session. “Blue, it’s sharp.”

“After I stole it from your easel, I filed down the edges.” He slipped it back into his pocket. “It’s mine now.”

Aodhan had no idea how he’d gotten lucky enough to call Illium his own, but one thing he knew—he was never letting him go.

“As you’re mine now,” he said firmly. “I’m making my fidget—the mental image on which I’ll focus anytime I start to backslide. Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that you’ll never let me fall.”

“Not even if you want to.” Illium slid his hand up to spread it over Aodhan’s ribs. “You’re a stubborn bastard, but I’ve decided to never again play nice when it comes to your nightmares—I’m hauling you back from the abyss even if you try to take my head off.”

“Call me beautiful again,” Aodhan rasped, his abdomen tensing. “I want to remember only you when I hear that word.”

He could all but see Illium fighting his overprotective impulses when it came to Aodhan. “Beautiful,” he murmured roughly. “Beautiful Adi with the artist’s hands and a spirit made of steel fire.”

His kiss was firm, demanding, his hand on the back of Aodhan’s head.

Aodhan sank into it, into Illium, and into the words that Illium spoke into his mind. Of beauty, of adoration, of sensual promise. The things that his abductors had taken from him by making those words things he associated with cruelty and pain.

Today, his Blue rebuilt his entire understanding—with Aodhan’s full cooperation. It was conscious, that cooperation, Aodhan anchoring himself in Illium each time he felt the wolves of darkness begin to gather, to howl.

When Illium put his fingers on Aodhan’s waistband, Aodhan sucked in a quick breath before falling into Illium’s kiss again as Illium tugged on the cord that was all that held up his pants.

The fabric pooled at his feet, Aodhan stepping out of it with conscious will.

No more flinching.

No .

“My beautiful man,” Illium murmured, his fingers tracing Aodhan’s lips as he kept on rebuilding the joy in the words that had been stolen from him. “Look at all that ridged muscle”—tracing his abdomen—“those powerful thighs.” His gaze dropped.

Aodhan’s throat worked, his shoulders bunching. The thighs Illium had admired grew rigid.

“All for me.” When he looked up, Illium’s eyes glowed with a power they shouldn’t, tiny suns that spoke of cells changing, morphing. “You became this so I’d never be alone on the battlefield. Your body is an act of love, Adi. Don’t you ever forget that.”

More walls cracked, crumbled, vanished into nothing. Because Illium was right. Aodhan had this body, these muscles, this strength him. He’d never been interested in becoming a warrior, could’ve spent his entire immortal life in a studio or out sketching in a field, his muscles loose and relaxed instead of defined and cut.

But that would’ve meant watching from safe ground while Illium flew out to battle. And that, he could simply never do. So he’d carved out time from his art instruction under Lady Sharine—such precious time—to attend lessons in swordcraft, ground grappling, and winged combat. He’d begun to run to each of his art lessons in order to build up his strength. And he’d taken up flying on long routes with Illium to increase his endurance.

All of it because he loved Illium more than he loved the art that was a constant melody inside him.

None of it had ever been a sacrifice.

How could he have forgotten that? Forgotten that his flesh was a testament to his love and devotion? That his body was a love song to Illium? “I love you,” he rasped. “More than air and sunlight, more than the sky or art.”

Another kiss, as fierce as it was tender as Aodhan tugged at the waistband of Illium’s jeans.

The rasp of cloth over skin, the brush of skin on skin, the motion of two bodies in perfect sync.

“Beautiful,” Illium said again in a breathless caress before they fell tangled and naked into bed.

Their aroused bodies pressed into each other, their wings overlapping as their thighs did the same. And Illium’s eyes so full of a violent power that wanted to devour him, they were on Aodhan’s face, his body, as he mapped Aodhan’s love for him with his hands and his lips and his words.

A warrior’s callused hands, but that same warrior had lips that sipped at Aodhan’s and fingers that played over him with delicate grace as he showed Aodhan that his body wasn’t just a vessel for agony, that it could bring pleasure beyond compare—not only physical, but of the heart.

“My beautiful, beautiful Adi with his skin like starlight.” Silken strands of black hair tipped in blue brushing over his chest. “Hold on, .”

Tears streaked down Aodhan’s face as Illium showed him what it was to trust a lover and have that trust rewarded a million times over.

An erotic kiss made tender.

A primal act laced with love.

A powerful body that treated his own with care, such infinite care.

Light sparked behind his eyes, brighter than sunlight on his skin, then he was breaking apart into endless tiny motes, a constellation of dazzling steel fire.

“I have you, Adi.” Words he heard through his bones, a vibration to his innermost self. “I have you.” Arms that wrapped around him, wings of silver blue that became his world.

He cried into the crook of Illium’s neck, sobbing out the pain held deep inside his soul, until it had taken root, twisting him up in ways he’d thought nothing would heal.

He hadn’t counted on Illium.

Who didn’t tell him that he was ruining the night with his pain. Arms locked around Aodhan, he said, “Cry, Adi. Cry the poison out, every last drop.”

A confession torn out of him before he allowed the memories to surface, allowed them to fill his mental voice as he told Illium his darkest secret.

that His body continued to tremble with his tears.

He’d been able to bear Raphael’s knowledge only because of who Raphael was to him, to them.

“I knew.” Illium’s voice was crushed rock. “You had a nightmare in the Medica about a month after we brought you home, woke up screaming things that hinted at it. I decided to wait for you to be ready to talk about it.”

Two hundred years, his Blue had waited. Two hundred years he’d continued to love him.

Love unconditional.

Emotion racked his entire body, until he could no longer identify the different strands.

A warmth at the small of his back, a softly furred and tiny body curling into him.

Illium and Smoke held him between them as he cried himself to exhaustion with the only beings in all the world to whom he could be this vulnerable.

He didn’t dream that night, his sleep endless and deep.

Illium continued to stroke Aodhan’s hair and back long after the other man had fallen asleep, Smoke’s purr having gone silent as she joined Adi in sleep. His heart had fucking shattered with each one of Aodhan’s tears, but he’d found a grim happiness in them, too.

Because, for a long, time, Aodhan had refused to cry.

It was as if he’d decided that he’d had enough time to recover from his torture and abuse, that he must now be stoic, his pain locked up in the most impenetrable part of his psyche. He might’ve retreated from the world, but he’d also retreated from himself, refusing to even acknowledge his scars.

Raphael alone must have known the entirety of it, because he’d stripped the minds of Aodhan’s abusers. Illium had no doubt that the sire had tried to get Aodhan to open up to the healers, but not even an archangel could make a savaged young angel speak of his horror if he preferred to encase that horror in stone and shove it away out of sight.

Raphael also wouldn’t have dishonored the trust between them by forcing the issue. Especially not when Aodhan had been so fragile, body and mind held together by the gossamer cobwebs of hope and will. Later…well, Illium’s lover was too strong, too stubborn, too determined to just .

Tonight, Illium had felt the stone casing not only crack but fall away. Because Aodhan hadn’t retreated after speaking of the crimes against him. He’d curled impossibly closer, his own wings folded back so that Illium could enclose him in silver blue.

“You are extraordinary,” Illium whispered, pressing a kiss to the diamond-bright strands of Aodhan’s hair as heat stung his eyes.

Illium’s entire being felt as if it had shifted this night, undergoing a fundamental change from which there could never be any return.

He’d never been jealous of Aodhan’s art, or his affinity to sunlight, or anything else that brought him joy. This wasn’t about that. Neither was it about a declaration of love. He’d never doubted that Aodhan loved him—that fact was a simple and inexorable part of his existence.

It was…

He couldn’t break it down, couldn’t put the emotion into words. He just knew that he was no longer the same man he’d been before this night.

The hours past reverberated inside him, his very cells stamped with the sparkle of stardust that was Aodhan.