Page 50

Says the man who cries at church hymns and pretends it’s allergies.

I bring my hands up to my eyes, mocking crying, slower this time, dragging it out for effect.

His jaw drops in mock offense. “I do not cry. I experience profound emotional resonance.”

I roll my eyes hard enough that he actually laughs, and for one breath, one whole clean breath, it’s easy between us again. The kind of easy we haven’t had much of since Malgrave walked through those doors and took the only weapon I’ve ever needed with me.

But his laughter fades quicker than it should, and I catch the shift in him before he even opens his mouth again, that stillness settling into his shoulders, the kind he only carries when something’s actually eating at him under all that celestial polish.

“Can I say something?” he asks. “And you don’t get shit-faced defensive about it, you enormous furry disaster?”

There he is.

I raise both eyebrows, which is the closest thing I’ve got left to a smart-ass reply, and gesture for him to go ahead.

“When you roared in that clearing.” He’s not looking at me anymore, staring instead at the far wall like the words are easier to find out there than they are when looking me dead in the eye. “When it hit, when Heaven and Hell actually merged inside you and came pouring down that bond… I felt something shift. Not just power. Not just the rush of watching you pull off something that shouldn’t exist.” His jaw works, and for a man built out of light and certainty, he looks unmoored in a way I’ve genuinely never seen on him before. “Something in me changed, too, Carnage. Something underneath the wings, underneath the mission, underneath every single fucking thing they built me to be. And my authority up there is not sitting easy about it. I can feel that much even without them saying a word.”

The garage goes quiet enough that I hear the drip of the leaking pipe over by Flux’s workbench, while something a hell of a lot heavier settles between us. I know exactly what he means, because I’ve been carrying the same weight since the moment that gold burned through my fire and refused to let go.

It’s there every time I close my eyes.

A hum underneath my ribs that never fully goes quiet anymore, a second heartbeat that isn’t mine and isn’t entirely his either, something left behind when his Heaven slammed into my Hell and came out as something else entirely.

“We’re in the middle of something,” Sentinel says, and the honesty in it gets to me more than any lecture ever could. “Something neither of us understands, something that’s already got Malgrave circling, a Council convening, and God knows what else stirring on the other side of whatever we cracked open. And I keep asking myself if it’s actually a problem.” He finally looks at me, and there’s something raw sitting behind his eyes, something that makes him look younger than every century he’s supposedly lived through. “Or if it’s just us?”

I hold his gaze and let that sit there, because some things don’t need hand signals. Some things don’t need a voice at all.

Feathered pain in my ass. Why does he have to make sense?

“At least we’re idiots together,” he says, and the ghost of a smile finally cracks back through, small but real.

I lift my hand and give him the finger, right in front of his stupid handsome face.

He laughs, head tipping back, wings shivering with it, because he knows exactly what it means coming from me. It means, ‘I’ve got you.’ It means, ‘Whatever this is, whatever we accidentally tore open between two realms that have hated each other since before either of us existed, I’m not doing it without him standing at my shoulder.’

“Charming as ever,” he mutters, still grinning.

It’s basically an I love you, and the bastard knows it.

Somewhere above us, past the garage roof, clouds, and whatever plane he answers to, something shifts again. I feel it the same as he does, that thread between us tightening like a plucked string, humming with a note that doesn’t belong to Heaven or Hell but to something new we made together in the dirt of that clearing.

Neither realm is sitting comfortably tonight.

And watching Sentinel’s throat work as he swallows down whatever that silence up above is telling him, I get the ugly, gut-deep feeling we’re the reason why.

Sentinel stays quiet for another few seconds before blowing out a breath and rubbing both hands down his face. “Well…” he mutters. “This is fucking inconvenient.”

A laugh tries to punch its way out of me on instinct, but all I get is air.

His eyes cut straight to me, and I point at him before the asshole can say a word. “I wasn’t going to.”

Bullshit.

I give him a look.

“Okay, I was absolutely going to.” He leans back against the bench beside me, his shoulder knocking into mine. “You make it difficult to be sensitive about your current situation.”

I grab my phone and type…