That was when Raphael walked back in. She expected an explosion, but he just took a seat in a chair opposite the bed, his eyes never leaving her. As she watched, wary, he hooked one ankle over a knee, and began to tap a heavy white envelope bordered with gilt against the top of his boot.

She held his gaze, did another two stretches. Her back felt like jelly, her stomach muscles so tight they hurt. “What’s”—a pause to draw breath—“in the envelope?”

Her wings snapped shut behind her, and she found herself leaning against the headboard. It took her several seconds to realize what he’d done. Something cold unfurled within the core of her soul even as he got up and dropped a towel on the bed, then retook his seat. No fucking way was this going to keep happening.

However, in spite of the turbulent fury of her anger, she wiped off her face and kept her mouth shut. Because he was right—she wasn’t his equal, not by a long shot. And the coma had messed her up some. But as of now, she was going to work on those shields she’d started to develop back before becoming an angel. There was a chance that—given the changes in her—she could learn to hold them for longer.

Forcing her rigid shoulder muscles to loosen, she picked up a knife she’d left on the bedside table and began to clean the pristine blade with the edge of the towel. “Feeling better?”

“No.” His mouth firmed. “You need to listen to me, Elena. I won’t hurt you, but I can’t have you acting in ways that bring my control over you in question.”

What? “Exactly what kind of relationships do archangels have?” she asked, genuinely curious.

That made him pause for a minute. “I know of only one stable relationship now that Michaela and Uram’s is broken.”

“And the Bitch Goddess is another archangel, so they were equals.”

A nod of his head that was more thought than movement. He was so damn beautiful that it made thinking difficult, even when she knew he possessed a vein of ruthlessness that was sewn into the fabric of his very soul. That ruthlessness translated into a furious kind of control in bed, the kind that made a woman scream, her skin too tight across a body that knew only hunger.