Breathless by Kelly Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

I’ve been sleeping for over one hundred years, or this body has at least. I need to get out and find Gracen. Stop her from doing something stupid.
    Stop her from hurting herself.
    I scoot the chair back and start to stand when Lucien does the same. When I say he does the same, I mean he makes the same motion, but with much more force than me. He’s so adamant and quick that it makes me flinch like one of those jump-scares in horror games.
    Yes, I love to play horror games.
    I don’t find that surprising.
    What I do find surprising is how quickly Lucien is up on his feet and begging me to sit back down.
    “Have another biscuit,” he says.
    “Eat some more bacon,” he says.
    “Come on, brother, have something else,” he says.
    And I just keep staring because obviously something isn’t right with him.
    Granted, he just crawled out of his grave a few hours ago, and that has to mess with your noodle.
    And the whole Hell thing…
    But he’s acting incredibly weird.
    Like incredibly.
    Like… something is going on.
    Something I do believe I need to know about. “What’s up with you?” I say because I’m tactful.
    “Nothing.” He gives a nervous laugh and sits back down in his chair.
    Nervous laughs. Not a good thing.
    “Nothing? Really? So everything’s hunky dory? Everything’s all right?”
    He glares at me. “No, Hart. Everything is not all right. The world is ending, and I’m an angel and should be out protecting it, but instead I’m here with you—as a human. Nothing is all right about that.”
    “Well, tell me how you really feel.” I sit back down with a plop and lean back in the chair. I resist the urge to put my hands behind my head. That might be pushing it with him.
    Would be kinda comfortable, though.
    “I’m serious, Hart. Look, the last three days have been terrible. They have. It’s been…”
    “Bad,” I say for him because it’s the only word that truly fits. It doesn’t do it justice. Bad… what kind of word is bad? It doesn’t show anything. Doesn’t prove how bad it really was. But it’s a word we can both agree on because we can both relate. It was bad.
    “Yeah, bad. But before that, Hart. Before that, we had our differences, and I sent you back to Hell more times than I can count, but—”
    “Wait a minute.” I sit up and hold my finger in the air. Let’s not get carried away. “You did not send me to Hell more times than you can count. Unless you can’t count higher than four.”
    His eyes sparkle. “Oh, please. I sent you back so many times. You never won. Never. And those girls who committed suicide, that was because I didn’t know it was you until it was too late.”
    And here I’d almost forgotten about them.
    All young girls I drove crazy to keep Lucien and all of Heaven off Gracen’s abomination trail. More things to feel bad about.
    Though technically I didn’t kill them…
    Oh, who am I kidding? Their blood is still on my hands. I’m still the last face they saw before they—okay, I don’t want to think about this anymore.
    “Four times, Lucien. You sent me back four times.” Four times he was stronger than me. Four times I could’ve killed him but didn’t. He’s my big brother, and I had a job.
    That’s what I always told myself. It was my job. That’s the reason I didn’t kill him when I had the chance. My job was to keep a semi-low profile. Not do any more than a regular run-of-the-mill demon, and regular run-of-the-mill demons have run-ins with regular run-of-the-mill angels all the time. The angels mostly sent the demons to Hell for a time-out. Sometimes the demon sent the angel back to Heaven to do the walk of shame.
    Occasionally, and I mean on rare occasions, either an angel would kill a demon or a demon would kill an angel.
    That’s when headlines would be made.
    Those are things that can start a war.
    Those are things that get you noticed.
    So, I did what every good demon did that kept revenge close to his heart on his angelic