Page 34 of Kazimir

“Arms,” he said softly.

I lifted them, obedient before I realized I’d done it. He slid my jacket over my wrists and smoothed the shoulders into place, one palm gliding down each lapel as if he were blessing me back into the world. It made me stupidly emotional.

He reached into an inside pocket and drew out a phone. He spoke, “Nikolay,” and something in his tone bent not to command but to kinship. He ended the call, tucked the device away as if the matter had never existed, and turned his knee a little toward me. A small shift. A held door.

“Your bag,” he said. “I asked my son to bring it up.”

I didn’t know what to do with that tenderness. I stared into the glass where my reflection was a pale smudge and waited. The office door opened with a restraint that belonged to a man used to making himself smaller for other people’s sake.

Nikolay filled the doorway anyway. He was big the way trees were big—inevitable, comforting. He glanced at me first, then his father, a silent check-in I felt in my bones. When he stepped in, the room felt warmer. He held my new handbag with a reverent hand, like it was a reliquary.

“Devon,” he said, voice a soft rumble that settled my shoulders. “I believe this is yours.”

“Thank you,” I managed, taking it. I knew the little bag was more valuable than all the contents of my apartment. The meager items inside were ridiculous compared to its cost. He treated my thanks as though everything was of equal value.

He looked at me like I mattered. He looked at his father like he’d followed that man into a thousand storms and would do it again. And then he was gone, the door clicking behind him without any ceremony, the scent of something warm and woodsy trailing in his wake.

“He’s kind,” I said, clutching the small bag.

“Yes,” Kazimir said simply. “That is his power. But his anger is only matched by his size. It's good that he is fond of you.”

He stood and offered me his hand. The impulse to take it was so strong it felt like gravity. Fingers to fingers, palm to palm, I rose because I wanted to be the sort of person who followed him without looking back.

His driver waited for us, and I knew where we were heading. I also knew this night was the beginning of a brand-new life for me.

Chapter 10

Kazimir

The estate kept the day at bay the way old cathedrals kept out weather—by weight and intent. I let the shutters drink the sun and left only a lamp burning at its lowest, a pool of honey light that stopped short of the bed. Devon slept on her side with one hand tucked under the pillow like she meant to catch a falling thing. I sat in the chair by the window and counted breaths I would have killed to protect.

The room I’d given her belonged to no one. I’d had it prepared that way: no ghosts, no scent of another woman’s perfume hiding in the fibers. Fresh linen. A bath large enough to forget a body in. A wardrobe refit by a seamstress who worked with my measurements and imagination. I had told myself she might refuse all of it and walk away angry. I had built the possibility of refusal into every plan. And yet when I set her bag down on the bench and watched her fingers skim the bedspread like a pilgrim touching a relic, something brittle inside me loosened with an audible crack.

After I’d fed her dinner, I allowed her time to change into the nightclothes I’d provided. She had washed her face and brushed her teeth with quality products. She didn’t argue. She just went about her routine. I turned the duvet back for her to settle into the bed, and she happily complied. Just before I exited her room, she’d asked me to stay until she fell asleep. There was no way I could deny her.

It was almost dawn when she’d fallen asleep, the kind of descent into oblivion reserved for the bone-tired and the finally-safe. It was the second thing that undid me. I had not earned her trust; I had only made it possible for her body to stop flinching long enough to rest. I took that as sacred instruction and did nothing to disturb it.

She turned in her sleep, and the blanket slipped. My hand moved to set it right without thinking, and my palm met the heat of her back through cotton. I meant to cover, not to touch. Habit betrayed me as my thumb found the seam of her spine. I followed it up and stopped.

Ridged beneath the thin softness of her shirt, two raised lines lay parallel, like healed burns gone ropey with time. They began at the inner edges of her shoulder blades and ran inward, then disappeared where the shoulder girdle thickened. Not random. Not accident. I had seen their like before, carved not by blade but by celestial will: attachment points. Torn. Sealed by an enemy who believed himself righteous.

The breaths I’d been counting went hard and thin. I flattened my hand and pressed gently until the heel of my palm found the left ridge. It rose under my touch like it had been laid there yesterday. Flesh remembered. The scar’s texture held a faint pattern if you knew what to look for—the way a mace head leaves a mark different from a knife. This mark had belonged to wings. No surgeon had cut them. No mortal had come near. This was divinity applying punishment with the cleanliness of a law that had never dirtied its hands.

But fallen remembered. That was their hell. That had been the law long before I crossed the sea wearing my father’s ring on a cord. You fell from the light and you walked the rest of your life with a perfect recollection of everything you had been and everything you had lost. Forgetting would have been mercy. Mercy was not the point.

Devon had no memory. She did not know her own name. Her mouth had been assigned “Jane Doe” once and then spat it out because it did not fit. She had fashioned her name from something she’d seen somewhere. It wasn’t given to her. She had two scars where her wings had been and no recollection of the voice that had spoken judgment over her. The design offended me in a way that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with balance. I believed in rules. I did not believe in this.

She shifted and made that sound again. I drew my hand to her shoulder and pressed there, a steadying weight. “Sleep,” I said softly, not sure if I was speaking to her or to the animal in my own chest.

My phone vibrated on the table with a mute insistence. I did not set it to ring in this room. I glanced at the screen: Maksym. I left her side as if it mattered whether the floor creaked and stepped into the small sitting area, the door half-closed. I answered.

“Maks.”

“Father.” His voice was paper-dry and razor-clean. “You asked for an immediate return call. I have it.”

“Proceed.”

“Sariel, the archangel,” Maksym confirmed. “He’s been active for months, but three days ago he surfaced in Prague—direct contact with the Angelic Court there. Word is, he’s hunting a fallen. Female, recently cast out. Considered dangerous.”