Chapter 1465: Black and Golden Surprise

Before Melissa could properly register that they had stepped beyond the penthouse and entered the private corridor of Infinity Chaos Hotel, Phei’s arm slipped firmly around her waist. She barely had time to glance toward him before she caught the unmistakable change in his smile, that wicked little curve which had become a warning all by itself over the years. Whenever Phei looked at her that way, whatever followed was usually shameless, unnecessarily dramatic, outrageously romantic or dangerous enough that a sensible husband might have considered mentioning it beforehand.

Phei, unfortunately, had never displayed much interest in being a sensible husband.

The polished floor vanished beneath Melissa’s heels.

There was no warning, no count and certainly no polite request for her to hold on before Phei swept her completely from the earth, catching her against his chest as the world dropped away beneath them with enough suddenness to tear a startled breath from her lungs.

By the time Melissa’s mind caught up with what her husband had done, they were already far above the upper reaches of Infinity Chaos Hotel.

She found herself cradled within Phei’s arms in a princess carry, her body held effortlessly against his chest while the colossal tower stretched beneath and behind them like some impossible silver monument thrust from Hell’s Paradise Island toward heaven.

From this height, even the absurd scale of Infinity Chaos became clearer. Glass, silver, dark metal and vast terraces descended for what seemed forever beneath them, while roads, gardens and surrounding structures had already begun shrinking into neat patterns across the island below.

The ground sat far enough away to make Melissa’s stomach produce several deeply unhelpful thoughts.

A sound escaped her somewhere between a gasp and a scandalized curse before she slapped Phei’s chest.

"Hey!" she snapped, more startled than truly furious, although the way her fingers seized the front of his shirt immediately afterward betrayed considerably more sincerity than the indignation upon her face: "You warning me before doing things like this would actually be a lovely habit to develop, ’husband’."

Phei of course just laughed.

He possessed neither the decency to look properly apologetic nor the slightest shame over having just stolen his pregnant wife several impossible heights into the sky without warning.

Instead, he looked absurdly pleased with himself while the morning wind threaded through his hair and sunlight spilled across his face as though the heavens had personally decided the man required help becoming even more irritatingly beautiful.

Still holding Melissa without the slightest strain, Phei leaned down and kissed her.

The kiss was slow enough to soothe the fright he had just caused and shameless enough to remind her that, yes, she was currently hanging several hundreds of stories above the earth while her husband flirted with her as though they were standing safely beside the breakfast table.

"I’m sorry, my love," he murmured when their lips separated, though the warmth in his voice carried suspicious insincerity— he would happily repeat under sufficiently entertaining circumstances.

Melissa narrowed her eyes.

Phei’s own gleamed with amusement. "Now then, how would you like to go to the hospital? Flying, or by car?"

Melissa simply stared at him.

The nerve of this man deserved study.

He had already kidnapped her into the heavens, frightened a respectable portion of her Soul out of her body and left her clinging to his shirt while the island rested far beneath them, yet he was asking about transportation with the casual seriousness of a husband deciding whether they should have tea or coffee.

Naturally, Melissa chose pride.

She lifted her chin, turned her face away with exquisite false annoyance and pretended she was not holding Phei considerably tighter than she had before. "Car."

Phei’s eyebrows rose. "Oh, really?"

"Yes, really."

For one heartbeat he simply looked at her.

Melissa knew that look too—

There was a dangerous brightness in his eyes that usually meant his nonsense had encountered resistance and, rather than dying respectfully, had immediately evolved into something worse.

Then Phei smiled.

"Oh, Mels," he said softly, so much amusement resting beneath her nickname that Melissa’s suspicion sharpened at once. "That’s unfortunate."

She barely managed to begin asking why before the heavens behind him changed.

Melissa felt the air tremble and opened around Phei, not with the violence of torn space but with the immense sensation of the sky itself being forced to acknowledge that something greater now required room within it. A presence unfolded behind his back, so vast that for one impossible moment the morning seemed to hold its breath.

The first wing opened— gold swept across the heavens.

The left wing rose from Phei’s back in a magnificent arc, unfolding farther and farther until its immense span dwarfed his body and caught the newborn sunlight across thousands of radiant feathers.

Calling it golden felt almost insulting to the thing itself.

Its color possessed depth, beginning in immaculate white near its roots before flowing outward into sacred gold so rich that every feather seemed forged from dawn rather than flesh. The farther the plumage spread, the brighter it became, until the longest feathers ended in tips that appeared dipped within the heart of the sun.

The morning light touched that wing and seemed lesser for the comparison.

Each enormous feather rested over the next with breathtaking perfection, regal and impossibly beautiful, their surfaces carrying faint rivers of luminous Essence that moved in slow pulses whenever the wing shifted.

Sacred warmth spread outward from it, gentle enough that Melissa felt none of the crushing pressure such a manifestation should have carried. Instead, the golden wing filled the air around them with a quiet vitality, a sense that anything sheltered beneath its span had been recognized as something worth protecting.

The right wing opened.

Beauty did not disappear.

—It just became terrifying.

Darkness unfurled behind Phei with the majesty of night given flesh. The wing was enormous, equal in scale to its golden twin, yet everything about it belonged to another end of creation. Black was too simple a word for the feathers. They possessed the depth of something lying beyond ordinary darkness, a color that swallowed every lesser shadow and made the emptiness between distant stars seem pale.

Sunlight reached toward it and vanished.

The golden radiance spilling across the morning sky did not glitter upon those feathers or slide across them before returning to the world.

Each plume remained perfectly visible despite that impossible absence, vast and layered, their edges carrying a faint serrated sharpness while a darker sheen occasionally moved over them like black liquid beneath polished stone.

Where the golden wing carried the promise of life, the black wing carried something Melissa’s instincts refused to mistake for death.

Death still belonged to the world. Death still came after life.

Whatever breathed from Phei’s right wing felt farther away than that, a finality so deep that the end of life seemed almost gentle beside it.

Yet neither wing leaked the wild energies they’d from their first manifestation.

No golden Life Essence flooded uncontrollably across the sky nor black darkness fell from the darker feathers to wound space beneath them. Both enormous powers remained perfectly restrained, gathered beneath Phei’s will with such effortless command that the wings appeared less like newly awakened manifestations and more like ancient parts of him creation had only now been permitted to witness.

Melissa forgot the car and for several heartbeats, she forgot the hospital too.

Her hand rose slowly toward her mouth while her eyes widened upon the impossible man holding her above Hell’s Paradise Island, one wing carrying sacred gold and the other an abyssal darkness that devoured daylight without struggle.

Together they spread behind Phei like some outrageous declaration written across heaven itself, proof that existence had played a joke for nineteen years by allowing anyone to believe he was merely an extraordinarily beautiful young man.

"How—?" Melissa breathed; she had not seen what he’d become.

The word barely escaped.

Phei looked indecently pleased with himself.

He dipped his head and kissed her again, softer this time, enjoying her astonishment with all the lazy satisfaction; he had absolutely intended to show off and had just received confirmation that the performance worked.

"What?" he asked when he lifted his head. "You’ve never seen an Angel before?"