Micah Read online

  Micah

  Fallen Angels 5

  Alisa Woods

  Check out all of Alisa’s bestselling Paranormal Romance...

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  READING ORDER

  Shifters in Seattle

  * * *

  True Alpha (Shifters in Seattle 1)

  * * *

  Dark Alpha (Shifters in Seattle 2)

  * * *

  A True Alpha Christmas (Shifters in Seattle 3)

  River Pack Wolves

  * * *

  Jaxson (River Pack Wolves 1)

  * * *

  Jace (River Pack Wolves 2)

  * * *

  Jared (River Pack Wolves 3)

  Wilding Pack Wolves

  * * *

  Wild Game (Wilding Pack Wolves 1)

  * * *

  Wild Love (Wilding Pack Wolves 2)

  * * *

  Wild Heat (Wilding Pack Wolves 3)

  * * *

  Wild One (Wilding Pack Wolves 4)

  * * *

  Wild Fire (Wilding Pack Wolves 5)

  * * *

  Wild Magic (Wilding Pack Wolves 6)

  Fallen Immortals

  * * *

  Kiss of a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 1)

  * * *

  Heart of a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 2)

  * * *

  Fire of a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 3)

  * * *

  Chosen by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 4)

  * * *

  Seduced by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 5)

  * * *

  Touched by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 6)

  * * *

  Loved by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 7)

  * * *

  Marked by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 8)

  * * *

  Claimed by a Dragon (Fallen Immortals 9)

  * * *

  Of Bards and Witches: Leonidas’s Story (Fallen Immortals 10)

  Fallen Angels

  * * *

  Tajael (Fallen Angels 1)

  * * *

  Oriel (Fallen Angels 2)

  * * *

  Asa (Fallen Angels 3)

  * * *

  Razael (Fallen Angels 4)

  * * *

  Micah (Fallen Angels 5)

  * * *

  Tempted: Tajael’s Story (Fallen Angels 6)

  * * *

  Kiss of an Angel: Cassiel’s Story (Fallen Angels 7)

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  Micah (Fallen Angels 5)

  Copyright © 2018 by Alisa Woods

  June 2018 Edition

  All rights reserved.

  Sworn Secrets Publishing

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the author. For information visit: Alisa Woods

  Cover by Steven Novak

  Micah (Fallen Angels 5)

  Paranormal Romance

  MICAH

  I was born in Sin, and shadow is all I’ve known… until her.

  My father is the most powerful of the shadow angels, and his lessons for me have always been simple, cruel, and full of pain: there is no Love in the shadow realm. I’ve survived by learning those lessons, reading his moods, and keeping my head down when his Wrath is unleashed. But I couldn’t let him again use the soft body of a woman to teach me not to care… so I helped Ren escape. I let her go because I can never have her—this way, at least she and the baby are safe. Only now, my father’s bent on destroying everything in his mad quest to take down the Light angels and enslave the humanity he loathes. And the woman I love is once again in his sights…

  * * *

  REN

  I’ve got a bad habit of picking Bad Boys… but the prince of the shadow realm? Really?

  Micah was going to be a hot, one-night fling—her last Bad Boy before she straightened up her life for good. After that, she would find a grown-up man who didn’t need a woman to fix his life. But tomorrow turned into a week later, and suddenly, she was waking up in love and totally pregnant with Micah’s baby. And trapped in a hellscape of shadow angels in the middle of an immortal war. All she wanted was Micah’s love… but this time, Mr. Wrong was Mr. Devastatingly Wrong. And no matter what the Light angels said, she wasn’t going back to Hell to fix him—even if it might stop a war.

  * * *

  In a war that threatens mortals and immortals alike, those in shadow have the most to lose—if the Warrior Angels awaken, it will spell their doom. Redemption might be found through the soft embrace of Love, but how to find Love in the middle of war? Especially when the forces of darkness will do anything to stop it.

  * * *

  FALLEN ANGELS is a follow-on series from the bestselling FALLEN IMMORTALS series. It contains sexy hot angels of light—and shadow.

  Chapter One

  The tip of the blade dragged across Micah’s back.

  His scream was bottled in his chest, stopped by gritted teeth and sheer determination—he wouldn’t let his father get more than the guttural groan Micah couldn’t suppress.

  “You see?” his father said. “The Light is poison. You were born in Sin, Micah, and Sin is where you belong. Shadow is your home.” The blade sliced Micah again, in the opposite direction, traveling slow and cutting deep.

  He gasped—the pain was blinding. For a moment, he couldn’t see the torture table, Elyon’s over-sized human form, or the blood-stained walls where other angelings had provided his father the dark pleasures he sought.

  Micah had lost count of the scores across his back. A dozen? No, had to be more. His vision wobbled back, but he was light-headed. He was weakening. The poison from the blade was seeping into him, sickening him. A normal shadow blade wouldn’t have this effect, but the light blade his father was using would slowly kill him. Where had he even gotten it? It wasn’t like a Light angel would voluntarily—

  Hot pain pierced him.

  Micah cried out, black spots swimming before his eyes. He couldn’t twist his head to see, but the searing pain was deep and in his side. Between his ribs…

  Fuck.

  His father leaned down to his ear. “I’m disappointed, Micah. I thought you knew better by now.”

  He tried to respond, but blood was welling up to choke him. It tasted of light magic.

  Perhaps his death would not be slow.

  Normally, he was exempt from this chamber—it’d been over a year since he was here last. But normally, Micah wasn’t foolish enough to ignore a direct order. Or to try to save anyone but himself. Especially not a human woman pregnant with his child. Forget the blade—the soft and vulnerable bodies of women were his father’s favorite tools for torturing him. And Micah just couldn’t let his father get hold of Ren, not again—not after he’d worked so hard to let her go. He would spend a thousand hours on the table to spare her one.

  Only now his father knew that.

  And he would make Micah pay.

  “You’re my son,” his father continued. “It’s even more important for an angeling like you to know his place.” There was a shift in his voice. Annoyance. Micah couldn’t help tensing up, even with the blade still stuck in his side and his father’s magic invisibly binding him to the table. He was hyper-attuned to his father’s every nuance—he had been since he left the nursery and joined the Regiment, meeting his father for the first time at thirteen and making his vows to the angel. That was ten years ago, but Micah had learned very fast how to read the many facets of his father’s anger.

  Elyon would kill if seized by a full-throated Wrath—then, it was best to just hunker down and count the bodies afterward. Or he would kill simply to make a point. He tortured for pleasure, and occasionally someone would die from that, but not often. Angelings were valuable, after all, and they could come back from an astonishing amount of physical abuse. And eventually, his father would bore of it and move on to sex. It was in that middle range—somewhere between cool cruelty and hot-blooded Wrath—that life became misery. If his father became annoyed, there was almost no depth to which he wouldn’t descend. It was a horror of pettiness. And Micah was sure there was something worse than being strapped to a table and carved slowly.

  There was always something worse.

  Maybe Elyon would kill him this time.

  As his father drew out the blade, fresh, slicing pain made Micah garble out a choked scream. It occurred to him that maybe—just maybe—his friend Terah was right. Maybe Micah had a death wish. It wasn’t like staying alive was easy in his father’s Regiment. Why tempt the fates by doing things he knew would bring him to this room again? The pain. The drumbeat of sneering that was almost as bad. Normally, his father left just enough time between torments for Micah’s angeling powers to heal his wounds—or heal enough so he would live to learn the lesson Elyon intended. His father was angel—and angels were always about lessons. Micah had heard the Light angels were the same. He often wondered what kinds of lessons they taught.

  And if they involved blades.

  Light blades… like the one just withdrawn from his ribs.

  Maybe he wasn’t supposed to survive this time.

  He waited for the next carving slice on his back—or a death strike to his heart—but it didn’t come. A moment later, his invisible restraints lifted.

  “Next time, don’t hesitate,” Elyon said. The annoyance was gone, a
nd the relatively safer cool cruelty was back. “If you have her, bring her back. She belongs in shadow, too.”

  Micah gingerly climbed down from the table. “Yes, my lord.” His back screamed in protest when he conjured battle armor to cover it. Most angelings in the Regiment wore black togas like Elyon, but Micah long ago discovered the practicality of having more skin coverage when your father—and the leader of your Regiment—liked to dole his lessons out on a torture table. That, and the light blade’s poison was spidering through his veins, turning them dark as they snaked across his chest. It would take hours, maybe days, to heal because of that.

  A lasting reminder… surely his father’s intent.

  “And we will recover your spawn, Micah,” Elyon assured him.

  His spawn. The baby he had formed while making love to Ren. While falling in love with Ren. And he knew exactly his father’s intent once she delivered that “spawn.” Ren would be disposed of like yesterday’s trash, her sole purpose now fulfilled. Micah lived in fear of him deciding even before the baby came to destroy them both—as he’d done before, to the women he’d desperately tried not to love.

  Twice.

  Always to teach him a lesson.

  Micah breathed through his teeth, but he managed to keep all expression off his face—years of practice made him an expert at that. Something that his love for Ren had also threatened.

  She made him feel. So much. And that was dangerous for them both.

  Which was why he fought to get her free. Why he didn’t bring her back.

  And why he lied about it.

  “You’re Magis, Micah,” Elyon went on, watching him adjust his armor over the slicing pain of his wounds. Being Elyon’s son earned him a few honors in the Regiment, but he was far from the only one. Being Magis—Elyon’s inner circle—was a much higher status. One he earned by decoding Elyon and his moods and acting in a way that kept Micah alive. “You’re supposed to be an example to the others. Don’t embarrass me again by hesitating.”

  “I’m sorry, my lord.” But he could tell Elyon had forgiven him, so he didn’t want to sound too contrite. He lifted his chin and looked his father straight in the eyes. “The shock of seeing my lord viciously slain on the battlefield was momentary. It won’t happen again, I assure you. And I stand ready to wet my blade with the blood of our enemies. Especially now.”

  “You will have your chance,” Elyon said. “But first, I want to remind our angelings of the benefits of the shadow realm.”

  “My lord?” But Micah was cringing inside, his gut twisting on top of the searing pain still in his side and working through his body. There was one thing Elyon prized as evidence of the superiority of the shadow realm over the Light. Sex. Lots of sex. Copious sex. With whomever you could hold down long enough to take it from.

  “I’ve summoned the Regiment.” A cruel light filled Elyon’s eyes. “I want you to take the lead in the orgy.”

  Micah’s light-headedness returned with a vengeance. “As my lord wishes.” No wasn’t an option. He knew better than that. And Micah had been participating in the orgies since he took his vows, so he was no stranger to Lust. But it was his least favorite of the Sins—unless it was with Ren. And then… he told himself his love for her made it less Sinful. He didn’t always believe it, but the last thing he wanted was to fuck someone else. Which was exactly why Elyon was forcing him into the “honor” of first pick—just like he’d forced Micah to betray the previous two women he’d gotten with child. Breaking their hearts before he destroyed them.

  Another cruel lesson.

  For Micah, not for them.

  Love had no place in the shadow realm—Elyon made that excessively clear. But he wasn’t content to strangle Love with violence and orgies and the horrors of the nurseries. He took a special interest in Micah—in all his Magis, really—and strived to destroy any capacity they might have for Love.

  Elyon smirked, which sent a chill through Micah’s heart, but he dutifully twisted to open an interdimensional portal and transport to the balcony outside the palace, arriving alongside his father.

  The angelings of his Regiment had gathered, the shush of their many black wings filling the air. Their murmurs rose higher when Elyon appeared, echoing in the vast black-crystal chamber that comprised Elyon’s domain. Micah had spent virtually all his days in this space—it was as tediously familiar as anything could be. He’d seen the human world, but only briefly. In combat, fighting the Light angelings on the streets of Seattle, and for a brief, shining moment when he kissed Ren goodbye and entrusted her to another shadow angeling—Asa, who promised her protection in Razael’s Regiment. Micah had hoped it wasn’t the worst mistake of his life, but it had all quickly gone to hell. Almost literally.

  His father had gone after Ren—well, he’d gone after his prized breeder, Eden, but Ren was supposed to be recovered as well. After Micah failed to bring her back, Elyon had left him out of the mission to the dragon’s keep for a second chance at retrieving both women. Leaving him behind was punishment—and Micah had lived in terror that Elyon would return with Ren’s child torn from her womb, just as he’d done with Eden the first time. Eden had been miraculously healed by the shadow angel protecting her, Razael, and Elyon was determined to have her back. But his father failed again—and this time, an entire legion was lost. It was fortunate Micah wasn’t there—apparently Razael had opened a Hellmouth and tossed every last angeling and two angels into its eternal torment.

  It was hard to imagine something worse than being his father’s son, but that was it.

  Elyon alone escaped, and now the entire shadow realm was behind him. They’d pledged themselves to his cause of bringing down the Light angels, with Razael the first target on the list, even though he was in shadow. Only now rumor had it that Razael had turned to the Light. Worse, Eden had supposedly brought him back to it with her True Love. It had the entire shadow realm in an uproar. Micah couldn’t see how it was possible—his love for Ren hadn’t turned him to the Light—but there were just too many instances to be ignored now.

  First, Razael’s own daughter had Fallen into shadow and then returned to the Light to bear a child. Then the Light angeling Tajael fucked one of the human scientists working on their interdimensional travel machine—yet he did not Fall. Then Oriel, a Light angeling who Fell and was captured by Elyon, betrayed him… and then returned to the Light.

  That one had incensed Elyon—several shadowlings paid the price for his Wrath.

  Then there was Asa.

  He had infiltrated Elyon’s Regiment and stole away Eden and Ren to begin with—at least, that was the story Micah told his father. Micah felt sure Ren would be safe then—as safe as it was possible to be. Then Asa turned to the Light, and the shadow realm lost its fucking mind.