Peter rose from the floor of the closet.
The morning was, by every honest accounting of the man inside it, won. Anastasia lay sprawled across the soft white carpet beside him, naked, flushed, her dark hair fanned out behind her, her grey eyes lazy and pleased and following him as he stretched his shoulders and reached toward the suit rack for the linen tunic laid out for him an hour before they'd ruined the floor.
The bite mark on his shoulder still hummed.
He smiled.
He was about to make a joke about Russian receipts.
He didn't get to.
His shadow opened.
That was the only honest description for what happened in the half-second before everything changed. The soft underglow of the closet was producing exactly one shadow at his feet—his own, faintly long, gold-edged from the architecture's flattering light—and that shadow, without sound, without warning, unfolded.
Something stood up out of him—an angelic silhouette of merciless white fire and divine wrath.
