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lifted to meet hers, their depths filled with an intense dislike that bordered on loathing. Alex blinked and took an involuntary step back. What the hell—?
    She’d barely registered her new partner’s reaction to her greeting, however, when a shutter came down over his expression, turning it bland. Impersonal.
    Trent smiled, reaching out a hand to her. “Detective. Good to meet you.”
    Still reeling from what she’d thought she’d seen in his eyes, what she had to have imagined, Alex stared at her new partner’s outstretched hand. She pulled herself together with an effort, dredged up another smile, and reached to accept the handshake.
    Her world imploded.
    Trent’s hand closed over hers with a surge of power that jolted through her, searing every nerve, every fiber; flooding her with an energy that was not her own, but belonged to her in a way she did not understand. An energy that made her more aware in that instant of Jacob Trent than of life itself. That tried to repel her even as it drew her into its source.
    A lightning bolt, Alex thought. I’ve just shaken hands with a lightning bolt.
    The grip on her fingers tightened and pain shafted through her bones, until, after what seemed an eon, Trent released her. The energy did not. It swelled between them, linking them, holding her immobile, squeezing the breath from her lungs.
    And then . . . then she saw the wings. Rising from Jacob Trent’s shoulders, spread in fiery, golden glory behind him. Wings, like those of a giant bird.
    Or an angel.
    The coffee cup dropped from Alex’s hand and shattered across the thinly carpeted floor in a shower of scalding liquid and ceramic shards. All around her, people scurried into action. One called for paper towels; another took her arm and tugged her away from the steaming mess.
    In the sea of chaos that surrounded them, that isolated them, Alex looked again into Trent’s eyes. Dark gray and turbulent, like Lake Ontario at the height of an autumn storm, they riveted on hers. Stunned. Disbelieving. Angry.
    Earthshakingly angry.
    On some instinctive level, Alex thought she should be afraid. Knew anyone else on the receiving end of that fury would have quailed in their shoes. But the quiver running through her—swift, stunning, shockingly familiar—had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition. Alex sucked in a ragged breath, fighting for an existence she sensed being ripped from her.
    She might never have seen this man before, but somehow she knew him.

FOUR
    Aramael clenched his fists at his sides, fighting the instinct to protect himself. The rage that defined his existence roared in his ears and surged with every beat of his heart, demanding everything he had to contain it. His wings quivered under the strain of holding back, pulsing with unspent power. If he lost his grip, if he slipped for even an instant . . .
    The activity around him faded into a background haze of muted voices and blurred movement. For long, agonizing seconds, there existed only himself and the savagery—and the woman.
    The woman whose touch had imprinted itself on his very core. Whose eyes, bluer than a hot summer sky, had seen the impossible, and even now held a thousand questions in their depths. A thousand questions and an impossible, unequivocal recognition that ignited a whisper of response within him.
    Aramael wrenched his thoughts back to his efforts, tightened his grasp on the tumult within him, and, at last, felt it yield. Slightly, reluctantly. His very center shook with the effort. In all his existence, he had never had to catch back the fury like this, never had to seize hold after it had begun. Never felt it surge to the surface on its own, independent of him, with neither warning nor provocation.
    The anger ebbed, stilled, subsided. Aramael exhaled the air burning in his lungs and forced his hands to uncurl and his wings to flex and then stretch. The activity around