“Vivie.” His fingers dive into my hair and tilt my head back. “I have found the one whom my soul loves.” He quotes a Bible verse, as though every answer we need lies in those words. “We were not put together to be torn apart. I don’t know what comes next. I wish I did.”
I close my eyes and push away the uncertainty. He’s an immortal angel. He can think that way. I’m not sure I can—I almost died once. He has until his birthday—four months—before his father returns and he’s forced to join him. What then? I shiver, and Breck shushes me, like he knows where my thoughts turned.
Shifting, he lifts me at the waist and hoists me to face level. “All I know is that you are my soul. I will do whatever it takes to keep you and to call you mine.”
Hugging his neck, I touch my forehead to his. “I have found the one whom my soul loves,” I repeat as my lips touch his.
Our paths collided eight days ago, but our souls were destined for each other. Our future chosen long before we were born. That is what I know. How? There’s no explanation, but deep within, something sings when it sees Breckin Roberts. And when I close my eyes, it tells me our story is far from over.
Epilogue
Elias
“You ran out of the house yesterday,” I call over my shoulder. He didn’t make a sound, yet I know he’s here.
“Oh? Did you miss me?” Hamon asks, and I turn. He leans against the open door to my hangar, his legs crossed at the ankles and his arms crossed at his chest.
I close the lid to my toolbox and adopt my own pose of insolence, propping my hip against my work bench. “Hardly”—I snag a rag and wipe the grease from my hands—“your son might, though.”
“Breckin hates me.”
“Do you blame him?”
“No.” Hamon straightens, pushing his hands through his hair and stretching his neck from side-to-side. “You kept things from me, Elias.”
His voice is filled with a deep-seated weariness. How much are his alliances requiring of him these days?
“I’m doing what you asked all those years ago,” I say, recalling another night, seventeen years ago, when he also appeared in my hangar.
June 2000
The echo of footsteps in my hangar stills my hand. He’s been missing for months, but I can’t look at him—my anger is too strong. Yet, I have news.
“Phaedra’s descendent had a child.”
He stops walking. “A girl?”
“Aren’t they always?”
“The father?” he asks as he rolls his broad shoulders back.
The question hits a nerve, a reminder of my failure, and I don’t reply.
“You have watched over her line for two hundred years, but this you do not know?” He sneers.
“I was dealing with the mess you made, Hamon. I left her unprotected.”
Stretching his neck from side to side, he steps farther inside, his wings bristling in the light breeze. Months gone and that’s all he wants to know? His inability to speak of Phaedra’s descendants aggravates me, but his unwillingness to ask about Breckin sets my blood to boiling.
I don’t hide my irritation. “You have no other concerns?”
“Is her child the same as the others?”
“Human? Yes, she seems to be.”
He stuffs his hands into the pockets of his dress slacks and releases a long exhale. “And Breckin?”
It’s about time.
“Obviously, he is half angel. He is healthy.” One of the Nephilim, not something Heaven likes having around. “The woman I hired seems nurturing. You should stay in Havenwood Falls for a while and spend time with him. He is your son.”
“He is nothing. You’ll watch over him as you do Phaedra’s blood, and when he comes of age, he’ll join the ranks.”
I clench my jaw. “You will let him choose, though. Won’t you?”
“The way we chose?”
Always this.
“We had a choice, Hamon.”
“We were given less choice than man. We were locked out of Heaven.”
Inhaling through my nose, I close my eyes and pray my words sink into his blackened heart. “There is time for redemption. You can change your ways. The wars will never stop. You can be on the right side.”
“Tell that to Phaedra.”
Everything comes back to Phaedra. I swipe the wrench I was using before Hamon arrived from the table.
“A demon killed her,” I remind him needlessly.
“Because she was powerless.”
We’ve had this fight for years. It is still pointless. I turn my back and return to working on my copter. Hamon’s steps resume, and I peek over my shoulder, finding him walking to the open doorway. Leaving already.
“What is the child’s name? Phaedra’s blood?” He asks at the entrance.
“Vivienne.”
His head bobs as his wings stretch out. “Watch over her. Watch over them both,” he says as he jumps into the air.
I return to present day when a grunt escapes Hamon’s lips. “I suppose we should have expected this.” He pauses, and I twist the rag and wait. “Them. Vivienne and Breckin,” he finishes almost reluctantly. “More punishment—”
“Maybe it’s His way of righting a wrong. His apology,” I interrupt.
“Nothing good can come of them being together. What is she? A human with angelic ancestry? Something else?”
“She is your son’s soul mate, and she is Phaedra’s great, plus a few, granddaughter. She is family, Hamon.”
“She is a complication. She will make him weak.”
Like Phaedra made you weak? He has to be thinking it. It’s in the way his muscles flex and tense. He’s angry, because he sees himself as he was years ago.
I toss my rag down and meet him halfway across the hangar. “Stay in Havenwood Falls. Be his father and help me figure out what this all means.”
The suggestion pulls a long sigh out of him, before he turns toward the exit. “I have a job to do, and so do you.”
“Hamon?” He’s leaving as he always does. Ignoring the salvation that knowing his son could offer him. Ignoring the forgiveness Breckin brings.
Hamon’s dark wings spread wide as he stops. “I’m not ready, Elias.”
“I’ll watch over him, then. I’ll watch over them both, until you are, old friend.”
Without a response, Hamon leaps into the night, his wings an ebony shadow against the snow-covered trees as he leaves Havenwood Falls.