Raphael brushed his thumb across her cheekbone. “If I do not?” A cool question.

“Stop trying to pick a fight with me.” She knew what haunted him—that his parents’ madnesses would one day manifest in his own mind, turning him monstrous. Except Elena would never allow that to happen. “We fall, we fall together.” A soft reminder, a solemn promise.

Elena. One hand going down to curve around her ribs, just below her breasts, as he moved his other thumb over her lips, shaping and stroking her.

“If your mother does wake,” she murmured, her top suddenly abrasive against her nipples, “what will happen to her?”

“Some say a long Sleep cures the madness of age, so she could once more become Cadre.” Yet Raphael’s voice said that he didn’t believe such a thing possible.

“Will the others on the Cadre try to locate her, kill her beforehand?”

“Those who Sleep are sacrosanct,” Raphael told her. “To harm a Sleeper is to break a law so ancient, it is part of our racial memory. But there is no law that bars a search.”

She knew without asking that he’d be undertaking such a search, could only hope what he discovered wasn’t a nightmare made flesh.

“I’ll speak to Jason,” he added, “see if he has heard any rumblings on this subject that I have not.”

“Is he healed?” Raphael’s spymaster had been injured in the same violent explosion of power that had leveled a city and smashed Elena to the earth. “Is Aodhan?” Both angels had refused to leave her and fly to safety, though they were far stronger and faster. Even as they fell to the unforgiving earth, the two males had attempted to shield her body with their own.

“If you are,” Raphael said, stroking his hand down to rest at her waist, “then of course they walk without injury.”

Because she was an immortal new-Made, while Jason was hundreds of years old. Aodhan, she wasn’t sure about—he was so very other, it was hard to judge—but the fact that he was one of Raphael’s Seven spoke for itself. “Beijing . . . are there any signs of recovery?” The city had ceased to exist in anything but memory after the events of that bloody night, so many dead that Elena couldn’t think about it without a sense of crushing weight on her chest, heavy and black and flavored with the taste of old death.