The Secret Read Online Free Page B

through the narrow window of their bedroom. “What are you talking about?”
    He looked at her for a moment, then he reached up, bracing his arm at her side so that his other hand was free to trail up her body.
    Over the curve of her hip. The dip of her waist. The rise of her breast.
    His finger settled over her heart and he wrote there, scribing the ancient words she had used to call him back. Dips and swirls of angelic runes over her skin. The incantation glowed gold under his hand.
    Vashama canem.
    “Malachi?”
    Come back to me, reshon .

    HOURS later, Ava still wouldn’t rest. He wondered if she was afraid to dream.  
    Malachi only dreamed of her.  
    He could see the dawn begin to break. Birds sang in the small garden below them.
    “I need to find out who I am,” she said, her voice barely audible in the quiet room.
    “What do you mean?”
    The first crackle of the muezzin’s call to prayer echoed through the air as Malachi rolled to his side and traced a hand over her shoulder, letting his magic flow over her. Her skin flushed gold as her mating marks came alive. She shivered at the contact.
    “Stop,” she said. “Don’t distract me.”
    He smiled. “But I’m so good at it.”
    She turned toward him, capturing his hand between her own. She laid them beneath her cheek, and he was content.
    “I need to find out who I am,” she said again. “ What I am.”
    Jaron. Hiding her in dreams. The Fallen protecting her from… something.
    Do not fear the darkness.
    “You want to find your father.”
    “Yes.”

Chapter Two

    “I’M BEING STRAIGHT with you, Ava. Your dad—”
    “When are you ever straight with me, Luis?” Ava paced in the living room.  
    Her coffee sat cold on the end table, and Malachi read the newspaper silently in the corner, keeping one eye on her and the other on the subtitles at the bottom of the television screen. The paper he was reading was Arabic. The news was in French.  
    She’d once thought herself fairly adept at languages. She had nothing on an Irin scribe.
    “Do I need to remind you that I don’t work for you?” Luis was starting to get pissy. “I work for your father. And his interests—”
    “Are your only interests. I get it. I’m not asking for much. I just want to know where he is because I need to ask him a question.”
    “Is it something I can help you with?”
    She clenched her fist so hard her fingernails dug into her palm. “Is there a reason why you’re blocking me from him?”
    “I’m not blocking you. Who said I was blocking you? Don’t you have his mobile number?”
    “He’s not answering it.”
    “What about e-mail?”
    “Not answering those, either.”
    Luis was silent. Her father’s manager wasn’t usually this big an asshole. He was an ass—he worked in the music industry, after all—but it wasn’t usually this bad. Which meant something was going on with her dad.
    She still had a hard time thinking of Jasper that way, but when she learned the news as a teenager, she hadn’t been all that shocked, either. He’d been a part of her life since she was a kid. She just didn’t realize he was her father. Jasper and her mother had remained close, despite their past relationship. In fact, Ava had always suspected that Jasper still held a torch for Lena. She was one of the few constants in his life.
    The other was Luis.
    “Luis…” She rubbed her eyes. “Tell me what’s going on.”
    “Nothing is going on. Your dad is in the middle of a tour, and you know how stressed he gets about that.”
    “Bullshit. He loves performing. The bigger the venue, the better.”
    “It’s tiring, Ava. I imagine he’s exhausted.”
    “You imagine nothing with him,” she bit out, her patience at an end. “You are in his business every single day. That’s why you have very nice houses in LA and Maui. So you know where he is. You know why he’s avoiding me. And you know what he’s been doing.”
    Luis said nothing, because there was nothing to