GABRIEL'S WOMAN EXCERPT ...

 

Gabriel knew the woman in the lusterless cloak. He knew her because he had once been her.

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Cold.

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Hungry.

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The perfect prey and the perfect predator.

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She came to kill an angel. She wouldn’t live to see the dawn.

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Jumbled voices spiraled upward on ribbons of yellow fog and gray smoke. Men in black dress coats and white waistcoats and women in shimmering gowns and winking jewels shifted inside a flickering maze of candlelit tables: standing, sitting; leaning back in Honduras mahogany chairs, slanting forward over white silk tablecloths.

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They did not know they were bait, the English ton who sought pleasure and the London whores who sought their wealth. They did not know that a woman stalked them.

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Gabriel’s body throbbed with knowledge.

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Of pleasure. Of wealth.

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Of life. Of death.

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By reopening the House of Gabriel—a tavern where every carnal desire could be satisfied—he invited both patrons and prostitutes. Sex and murder.

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White flame shot upward.

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Twenty feet below him, a man snared his gaze.

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A man whose hair was as dark as Gabriel’s was fair. A man with violet eyes instead of silver.

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His right cheek was pitted with shadow.

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Twenty-seven years of memories arced between them. Images of war-hungry France instead of winter-shrouded England. Of two half-starved thirteen-year-old boys instead of two forty-year-old men in tailored black dress coats and white waistcoats.

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My two angels, the madame who had plucked them off a Paris street had said. A dark one, for the women. A fair one, for the men.

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She had trained them to be whores, and they had excelled at it. She had taught them the eighth deadly sin, and they had broken it.

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The flare of candle flame dimmed, abruptly recalling Gabriel to the pistol that weighted his left hand.

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Michael, the scarred angel, had come to protect Gabriel, the untouchable angel.

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Revenge would not be possible without him. Without him, there would be no need for revenge.

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The woman would die because a dark-haired angel lived.

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And loved ...

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And loved….