Pain lanced up and down Amaya’s spine. She clung to Bane one second and pushed him away the next. “The dark…the dark…”

“Shhh.” He held her tighter. “We’ll be out of here soon.”

“The d-dark!” She couldn’t stop stuttering, shaking. Ice coated her bones. One million needles drilling into her would’ve felt better. “Bane. H-help m-me.”

Cradled in his arms, she had the sense of movement, but all around her was darkness, the complete absence of light. “Black hole?”

“No, baby. We’re in the shadows.”

She clawed at him to get away. Humans didn’t belong in the shadows. Nothing with a soul could survive in this place. She was dying. He brought her here to kill her. “Let me g-go!”

His grip became a vise. “If I let you go, you’ll be lost. I may never find you.”

“It hurts,” she screamed.

“I know. If I exit now, they’ll find us. I don’t want to lead them back to the farm, so we have to stay in a bit longer.” He brushed his lips across her forehead. “Can you hang on?”

She managed a weak nod, then fisted his shirt and buried her face in his chest. She didn’t want him to see the tears leaking out of her eyes. “Okay.”

Wind caressed her skin and the scent of diesel clogged her nostrils. She peeled open her eyes to a blurry world. Slowly, the green and white sign of a gas station came into focus. “W-where?”

“A pit stop.” He moved so fast through the neighborhood of houses and tree lined streets. Her stomach rolled. Everything she’d eaten crawled back up her throat. She scrambled to get away, then the shadows swallowed her again.

She vomited, and begged Bane to stop between bouts of food hurling out of her mouth. He didn’t. She lost track of how many times he popped in and out of the shadows until she welcomed the darkness and slipped into unconsciousness.

Something wet touched her lips. Water. She slurped it down. Some missed her mouth and it ran down her cheeks to her throat and into her cleavage. It cooled some of the heat roasting her from the inside out.

“Slow down. There’s more.” His voice rumbled close to her ear.

She shifted and realized the firmness under her back wasn’t a mattress. She sat up and a rag slid off her forehead and plopped into her lap. He handed her the water bottle and she drained it, enjoyed the coolness spreading from her throat to her chest and abdomen.

Just doing that sapped her energy and she slumped back against his body. Details of the room came into view. “You brought me to my hotel room? How did you know where I lived?”

“Hotel key in your back pocket.”

She needed to move off his lap. A few more seconds after the lethargy passed, and she would. A shudder ran through her. Bane’s arms tightened around her. The shudders ceased, replaced by sudden awareness of every hard, cool inch of him. Heat traveled to a more intimate area, an area that shouldn’t have any awareness of him.

Amaya scooted away to the opposite side of the bed. “You’re supposed to be guarding the Cruor.”

“You’re more important.”

And the heat was back, causing a mini fire in her pants. When a man says you’re more important than the fate of the world, there really isn’t a response to that. “And your friends? What about them?”

“You’re more important.”

She looked up, down, around, anywhere but at him. “You should have taken me straight to the farm instead of here.”

“Leading the UnHallowed to the farm wouldn’t have been wise. I don’t know what their reaction would have been to the Cruor. Plus, I don’t think Michael would’ve approved.”

That’s an understatement. “How did you know where to find me?”

Instead of answering the question, he said, “What were you doing there?”

Now the interrogation begins. “I went there for a steak and a beer.” She left the bed and sat on the edge of the dresser while he lay propped up against the headboard. His leather trench coat was tossed into the corner chair. His black, short-sleeved tee stretched over his chest and really highlighted his biceps. One leg stretched to the end of the bed, the other rested on the floor. The LED lights of the bedside lamp showed his pale skin and the shine of his hair. He seemed comfortable, completely relaxed, though the bed was too small to accommodate his size.

“What else do you want to know? Do you want to know if I started it? No. I didn’t. Your friends were there and I could see them. They were behind this protective bubble and I could still see them. The waitress noticed, said the word UnHallowed, and shit rolled downhill from there.” She folded her arms across her chest because now it was her turn. “Who are they? Scarla let their names slip. Now, I want their titles.”

His chest expanded on a long inhale and he shifted to the edge of the bed. Elbows on knees, he sat there, his hands folded. He was not getting out of this.

“The one with gray wings, start with him,” she ordered.

He cranked his head around and met her gaze with a scowl. “His name is Daghony, Archangel of Souls. His title didn’t change when he fell. Kushiél, the one with the mohawk and scar, was the Archangel of Atonement. Now, he’s the fallen Archangel of Punishment. Chayyliél was The Powerful One, the strength of God. Now, he’s half his size and has a quarter of his strength.”

She hid her surprise at his unexpected response by ducking her head. “What was your name, your title before you fell?”

“I didn’t have a name or a title in Heaven. I was one of many warrior class angels. None of us had a name. I took the name Bane in the 1700s and added McIntosh because I liked Apple.” She noted the hint of bitterness in his voice. “Enough about me,” he continued. “Remove the other contact.”

Amaya swallowed and thought about defying him. In the end, her shoulders sagged. Fighting the inevitable was pointless when he already knew the truth. She brought her thumb and forefinger to her left eye and scooped out the colored contact and flicked it away. At the last moment, she whirled around. Their gazes locked in the mirror hanging over the dresser, facing the bed. Then she focused on the gold lightning that dissected both her pupils and irises.

His gaze flinty with a thin circle of red, his voice brittle, “Tell me again, Amaya…who fathered you, and this time, I want the truth.”