Then he was gone. No, he hadn’t vanished—he’d just run insanely fast, and when she saw him again, he was already at the top of the stairs. Seline rushed after him. “Sam?”

Wood splintered and crashed upstairs, and she heard a bellow from Sam that sent a shiver through her.

Then she was at the top of the landing. Seline ran into the apartment, but after only a few steps, she froze at the sight before her.

Blood—so much blood. Everywhere. On the walls. The floor. Even the ceiling.

Sam had bent over the broken body that lay sprawled on the floor. He shifted a bit, and she saw Omayo’s face. She wanted to close her eyes and look away because there was so much terror and pain carved onto his frozen features.

Sam’s hands fisted and his head turned, very slowly, to meet hers. “Is this what you’ve been doing for your whole life?”

She barely heard the words. Her gaze was on Omayo’s throat. No, what was left of it. His throat had been ripped open. Her own hand rose to cover her mouth as the stench of death and blood nearly choked her. So much worse than a tomb.

Sam surged to his feet and stalked toward her. “He didn’t deserve this! Omayo never hurt anyone or anything. He f**king delivered messages! He delivered his messages, did his job for five thousand years, and the bastard just wanted the chance to feel. He got to Fall, and he wasn’t hurting anyone.”

No, no, Omayo hadn’t been hurting anyone. When word had come through that he was a possible Fallen, she’d been sent in for surveillance. Though she’d watched, she’d never gotten very close to him. Everything had been from a careful distance. Hell, she’d never even noticed his wings, or rather, the shadowy image that followed Sam.

After just a few days, it had quickly become clear that— whatever he was—Omayo wasn’t in town to hurt or destroy anyone. He’d kept to himself, barely communicated with anyone except the human ladies he seemed to like, and he sure hadn’t been looking for trouble.

“Your team did this!” Sam stood right in front of her now. His power seemed to surround her, trapping her in place. “Is this—is this the kind of twisted shit that you’ve done to the Other?”

She shook her head as his words finally sank in. “No!” She grabbed his arms. “You can’t think—”

But his face could have been carved from stone. “It’s your job to take out the guilty, right? By any means necessary.” He glanced back at Omayo. “Fallen aren’t easy to kill. So I guess, sometimes, things get a little . . . messy.”

Her nails dug into his skin. “This isn’t the way we operate.” The kill was fresh. That smell . . . She tried really hard not to inhale. Her gaze flew around the room. Blood had dripped in rivulets down the walls. “This was—”

“A slaughter?”

Yes. She nodded. “The kills are clean and quick, and only for those that Rogziel has—”

“But Omayo was on his list, right? Another Fallen to take down.”

“He was only to be watched, not killed! Dammit, not killed!”

“I guess someone didn’t get that message.”

Sam pulled away from her and yanked out his phone. He punched the screen and lifted the phone to his ear. A pause, then he barked, “Cole, dammit, I need a cleanup crew at Omayo’s, and I need the crew now.” He ran a hand through his hair. “We aren’t leaving him like this.”

She turned away, not wanting to look at the body. But the blood was all over the place. So much and—

Her heart slammed into her chest. The blood on the left wall . . . Someone had written in that blood.

The letters had dripped, become slanted and twisted, but she could still make out the one word.

Fallen.

“Sam.” She said his name too softly. He was still growling into the phone. She spun around. “Sam!”

He turned to face her. She lifted her hand and pointed to the wall. “I think we’ve got a problem.”

Sam marched to her side. He stared at the letters on the wall. After a moment, he asked, voice lethally soft, “Did Rogziel have other Fallen Angels that were being watched?”

She swallowed to ease the desert dryness in her throat. “Other than you?” she asked, wanting desperately to be out of that apartment. “Not like he even told me you were Fallen.” No, he’d just let her walk blindly into that one. “The guy wasn’t exactly sharing confidences with me.”

Sam’s eyes were still on the bloody wall.

She had to get out of there. Seline rushed for the door, nearly running because she couldn’t stay in the apartment with the body another moment. She’d done plenty of things that she regretted in her thirty years, but she’d never seen anything like that. Sam was right. It was a slaughter.