Blood of Angels by Kathryn Ann Kingsley

Author:Kathryn Ann Kingsley [Kingsley, Kathryn Ann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640346222
Published: 2020-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The next morning, she stood in the shower, trying to straighten out her thoughts. Alistair’s words were still tangled up in her head, and she was attempting to sort through how she felt about them.

She’d admit she was wrong about his suffering. She had claimed he couldn’t possibly be lonely. But the darkness in his eyes when he had told her of how much loss he’d suffered was undeniable. Not even he could lie his way through that. She had seen into a chasm of a man—of an archdemon—and it was far deeper than she had ever thought.

I hide behind this veneer of a man to conceal my sorrow, my loneliness, my pain.

Lowering her head beneath the stream of water, she let the hot water sort out the tension in her shoulders.

How did she feel about him?

It was a tangled ball of stupid emotions. It was like that ball of Christmas lights after ten years in storage. Better to chuck the whole thing and buy a new strand than spend a solid week trying to straighten it all out.

But she was stuck with this mess. She didn’t have a choice. She had to metaphorically sit down and figure it all out. She didn’t even know where to start. Letting the water pour over her, she tried to take each thing she felt one at a time and label and understand it.

The first part of her sympathized with him and wanted to reach out to him—wanted to forgive him. She couldn’t deny that part of her understood why he had made her. At least in part. It also wasn’t a fact that was ever going to change. She existed, and by the looks of things, she was going to keep existing for a long time. People didn’t get to pick how they came into this world. Being pissed about it was only going to make it worse.

And, as she said to him yesterday, she didn’t hate Azrael. So how was it fair to hate Asmodeus for the same deed? He had sculpted her for very different needs. He had made the body she knew was beautiful for his own desires. It had always felt wrong—entitled—to hate her body when she knew there were a hundred million people in the world who would kill to live in it instead.

But there was a sick, twisted aspect to that part of her story that set Azrael and Asmodeus apart on the sliding scale of douchebag actions. Their motives hadn’t been the same, after all. Azrael wanted a daughter. Asmodeus wanted a wife. They were very, very different things. One’s motivation was pure. The other, hungry.

Part one wasn’t solvable, so she put it aside and considered the second part of what she felt. The part that wanted to run away. That one was easy to dismiss. She wasn’t a coward. And she didn’t have a choice. It was easy to be brave when there weren’t options.

Part three, a pretty decently-sized chunk of how she felt really wanted to kick his teeth in.

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