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I ron had known a fair amount of temptation in his day but never the sort that had chosen to visit him on the whispers of butterfly wings. Or were they moths? No . . . Skippers? Those insects with the patterned wings but with those cute anime eyes that always took in far more than their size should allow?

Fuck. Did it matter what kind of horse his dream girl rode in on each night if he could never truly see her? Iron kicked out in frustration against the tangle of flannel sheets anchoring him to his bed in the waking world while the more vulnerable cerebral parts of him sank further into his dream space.

Every night for the past three months, he’d crawl into bed, resigning himself to the tantalizing show his worse-for-wear mind would conjure up. And every night, like clockwork, his feverish thoughts would manifest her . Well, parts of her, at any rate.

It began when Iron had officially taken over as foreman for building the new homestead for his brother Rhode, the former seraphim commander of the Empyrean’s legion of spying angels, and his brother’s soul bond, Neela. And by taken over, he meant thrown himself into a project that would mentally and physically exhaust him to the point that his body had no choice but to tune out the hard truths of his reality and thoroughly pummel his tired ass into the mattress. Okay, so perhaps he wasn’t exactly following the tenets of avoidance coping, but one didn’t get to be an immortal angel as old as him without learning how to break the rules that needed breaking.

Too bad fate, like always, was a fickle bitch and would sooner yank the spark plug out of his car just so he could learn how to get himself back on the road rather than road flare that journey for him.

Suffice it to say, Iron needed the life lessons and reminders of his solemn circumstances about as much as mortals needed juice cleanses and food detoxes. Last he checked, humans still possessed livers and kidneys, but far be it for him to point out the functions of their own goddamn anatomy when he could barely keep his head straight.

Every single one of his warrior sentinel brothers had become mated. Not just mated but soul bound. Anointed with their other halves and inseparable regardless of the reasons that had landed all the angels in this mortal prison in the first place. Fortunately for them, when the road ahead blasted a firehose of eternal uncertainty at you, it was always a mite easier to stomach the stuff if you had someone worth braving the unknown for to lose yourself in each night.

Iron’s limbs slowly stilled, finally giving over to that familiar heaviness that urged his muscles into their nightly repose beneath the sheets. The elemental magic of the minerals and metals within the great mountain he slept beneath had begun its ministrations, unstitching the day’s tension to allow Iron’s celestial powers to recharge.

A feat he was now also alone in, as the soul bond connection had finally unleashed his brothers’ full celestial powers after eons of magically imposed limitations while his own were still on a tight tether of daily depletion and necessary renewal.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

The reminder kicked around his skull with rattling recognition. It was always there. The stark otherness of his circumstances while the ones he loved the most healed and grew into the full family of warriors they’d always meant to become.

It was a vision he’d long ago abandoned for himself, no matter how comforting the appeal felt wrapped around his most private thoughts, where he permitted, on the rarest of occasions, his mind’s indulgence in fantasies.

Had he known what was coming for him, however, he’d have locked his mental palace up good and tight, as one would when faced with any sort of torture.

The first time the woman visited Iron’s dreams, he’d done what instinct had him do against any intruder: fight. His mind had always been a safe space, regardless of the terrors his psyche would choose to visit upon him. At least, if he had to relive the past, the elements of his torment would be familiar. The players, the souls, the demon charmers. It was a dreamscape crafted from battlefields both celestial and terrestrial, from blood and magic to more sinister parts of his existence. But it was always his, and it was always familiar in some way. After all, outside of a few notable exceptions spawning from chain restaurants, even bad pizza was still good, to a degree. He was content to exist, even if the existence came with a toll. It was a toll he knew, however, and one he’d grown accustomed to paying.

Until the night after their most recent battle with Cyro, the demon ruler. That was when she had appeared.

The first glimpses of her were always the same, and that was how he knew that nothing of the dream girl visiting him was by chance.

Fate, as usual, had its grimy hands under his hood.

Even now, as the heaviness of the dreamworld shifted in its opacity to reveal the spun silk of her hair that always seemed to reach for him before floating away, a new emotion rose to the surface: impatience. By the mages, even in his dreams, he was brimming with the stuff. Though he had no idea how, his body, both within the dream and without, still reacted to just the mere suggestion of her. Every muscle and tendon was strung tight, his shoulders tense, the coarse hairs of his beard scratching against his neck as his jaw clenched into a position his molars would curse him for later.

And then he felt it. That deliciously soft hair grazing across the inside of his reaching forearms, pulling up every single goose bump in its wake. Among the swirling white misty landscape of his mind, the delicate curtain of golden copper would always pool in the cruxes of his elbows, tempting him to twist his wrists so that the strands might sift through his fingers. But he couldn’t. He’d learned that lesson the first dozen or so times he’d tried, which was how he knew she was no ordinary dream girl and this was no ordinary dream sequence. Every time he tried to grasp the vexing creature, something would yank her away from him and dissolve her back into the ether of his mind.

It was a new type of aggravation, one he regrettably couldn’t smash into submission with his mace or disintegrate with the flames of his angel fire.

So he waited and waited as he did every time, until the female finally crept closer and grazed the skin of his arms with a brush of hair so soft and tantalizing, his breath caught.

Holy shit.

For the first time since she’d begun visiting him in his dreams, an outline of her form had begun to take shape.

Mages, she was so . . . slight, with her head barely tall enough to clear his rib cage, even if he allowed himself to stand at his full height around her, which he never did because, even in dreams, he knew how imposing his form could be to a woman. The mists around her steadily compressed into one slender arm, then another as small hands with dainty fingers rested on the outside of his elbows. The sensation of her ethereal touch against his skin was as odd as it was fleeting. A shiver of awareness thrummed through his body, coiling down his spine and stroking the secret part of him where his full celestial power had dwelled once upon an eternity.

And damn if he didn’t feel that caress brush across every nerve ending. Iron’s back teeth met again, and not for the first time, he wished he didn’t sleep naked. Which was more than a little bit ridiculous, right? We existed in dreams as our mind saw us. But right now, as her soft feminine curves coalesced before him, he sure as shit regretted the image he was presenting to her: that of a bulky and very nude heavily muscled male with a sleep-tousled rat’s nest of a mane brushing his shoulders, a beard a few days past a decent trim, and the most painful erection that refused to point anywhere other than at the dream woman before him.

Jesus fucking Christ. He looked like some goddamn NFL nose tackle who’d just wrestled a bear, sacked the starting and backup quarterbacks for half a dozen plays, and then had somehow stumbled into the women’s locker room.

Iron exhaled through his nose and started to curl his fingers into his palms in frustration, but the woman let out a soft gasp and floated away, dissolving some of the form she’d begun to take.

“No!” he rushed out, knowing full well his plea would go unanswered, as his words always did. Iron tried to reach for her but caught only air. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean?—”

“Who are you?”

Iron froze. All the moving parts knocking around in his cerebral space just locked everything up tight. His limbs, his muscles, his mouth.

Had she just . . . spoken?

The wisps of white ether merely continued to dance before him, like a puppy playing keep-away, once more cradling the sheet of copper hair that was the only defining feature he’d ever been able to make out. Until just a moment ago, when he’d heard her voice for the first time.

A deeply resonant alto with a hint of annoyance that was so hurried, it seemed she barely had the patience to get the question out. He replayed those three little words in his mind and couldn’t help but smile at the realization that tightened around his quickening heart. Her you had been spoken softly, barely even audible, but was still delivered with an air of indignation that he hadn’t yet answered her question even before she finished speaking it.

The corner of his lips ticked up slowly. “You’re a New Englander. From New Hampshire, if I had to guess.”

Her silence was the confirmation he was shocked to discover his soul craved. Shocked on a few accounts. The first, because in all the months of their now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t dance, he’d never once heard her voice. And the second being the literal gut punch of power blasting him behind his sternum that almost brought him to his knees once he’d heard her speak. But the blast was just as fleeting as the hope that had begun to flare in his chest.

His power. His full celestial power was there, knocking at his basement door like a boxed-away relic, and then it was gone just as quickly.

“How do you know where I live?” she asked, her words breathy and worried.

More indignation. More sass. But all of it was veiled under a blanket of uncertainty. And fear, if he had to guess.

Rattling breaths bellowed out of his lungs, which was a crying shame, because the poor things had yet to resume maximum capacity as far as the whole oxygen-intake thing was concerned. Iron squeezed his eyes shut and sank into the three-seconds-ago memory of what his body knew to be true. Yes, that roaring resonance within him was his angel fire. His full angel fire. A power he’d not known since he and his brothers had fallen from the Empyrean, Heaven’s highest realm, way back before mortals had even been a thought.

Iron flattened his palm against his chest, his grip losing purchase against the sheen of sweat that had bloomed across his skin. Desperately, he scrambled to reach for it again. The door, the lock, whatever sort of fucking key would fit in the lock. Something that would grant him access to the very powers that would once again make him whole. When he came away with nothing, he gritted out a curse and opened his eyes.

The white ether had settled around slim shoulders now sadly hunched. Angled creases formed among the mist, sketching an elegant neck and softly rounded face beneath a mass of red hair. Iron sucked in a breath as more parts of his dream girl began to take shape. Pert nose. Dainty ears with adorable detached earlobes. A lower lip slightly fuller than the top. And then the wispy waves of his dream pulled his eyes lower, outlining her breasts, slightly rounded belly, and flaring hips.

Her eyes were the punch he didn’t see coming. Vibrant jade orbs blazed amid the swirling ether as they stared right at him, quieting his rising panic and replacing it with an entirely new preoccupation.

“I’ll say this again,” she said. “Who are you?”

A tremulous wonder finally illuminated what he’d been searching for: the key to his basement door. By all the motherfucking mages he’d sworn had abandoned him long ago, there she stood, as real as his secrets and as haunting as the future he’d never thought possible.

It had all been delivered in the form of a green-eyed goddess born of the fears in his mind. The answer to his fate. The solution to his bleak existence.

Iron straightened his spine, curled his hand into a fist, and dropped to his knee before her. In his periphery, the dreamscape moved slightly, pulling her farther back away from him, but he didn’t care. Now that he knew who she was, what she was, there was nowhere she could go that he would not find her.

The weight of his discovery sank heavily onto the back of his neck as he bowed his head. With equal parts fear and determination, he smiled as he closed his eyes and mentally stepped closer toward the precipice he’d been set upon.

Fate had chosen a path for him once before, and it had nearly destroyed him. He would not allow the mages to condemn him so again.

“I am yours.”