Lord Brickton hacked at the convenient excuse they had fed all the news reporters and police in the days following Gabby’s injury and Nora’s murder.
“Lucky? You call this lucky?” He stabbed his finger again, this time in the direction of Gabby’s inflamed cheeks. The flush made her pink scars ever brighter.
“My point is, it wasn’t our son who harmed her,” Lady Brickton said.
Ingrid’s father turned on his heel and stormed toward the windows overlooking the churchyard. Gabby, standing near them, darted away, toward Ingrid. They shared a horrified glance.
“He’s a fiend. You think you know him, but you don’t. None of you does,” their father said, staring out at the snowy lawns.
What on earth was happening? Their father had shown up unexpectedly, exploded into a rage, and was now calling his own son a fiend? Ingrid took hold of Gabby’s hand and pulled her close. She felt her little sister tremble. A spark shuttled from Ingrid’s right shoulder, like a shooting star arcing toward her fingertips. Anger. She was getting angry, and that always set the sparks off. She breathed deeply and remembered the cold. She closed her eyes and imagined shoving her arms into a bank of snow.
“It wasn’t Grayson.” Ingrid’s whisper cracked loud against the silence. She opened her eyes. Her father was still staring out the window, his face pinched.
It hadn’t been Grayson, though it very well could have been. When he’d been in hellhound form, he’d tried to kill Gabby. He’d sunk his fangs into Ingrid’s skin, injecting her with enough demon poison to take her through a fissure and into the Underneath. He’d certainly had the claws to do the kind of damage that had been done to Gabby’s face.
But to tell their father this, to confide in him the truths those at l’Abbaye Saint-Dismas now knew, would ruin everything. If he knew the truth, he’d whisk them all back to London. It was a fate none of them wanted. Mother, with her gallery on the horizon and artists barraging her with requests to exhibit; Gabby, with her Alliance dreams and Nolan’s promised return; Grayson, who was nothing at all like the young man who’d left London in the fall. And as for Ingrid, returning to London could be a disastrous move. Axia could get to Ingrid anywhere. Paris, London, the darkest corners of Africa—it didn’t matter. There were fissures all over the world. When the Alliance leaders, a group known as the Directorate, had strongly urged Ingrid and Grayson to go to Rome for better protection, she had flat out declined. At least here in Paris, Ingrid had Luc. She had Vander and the Alliance members she knew and trusted. Leaving them simply wasn’t an option.
“Philip—” their mother started to say, but the front door opened and then slammed, silencing her. Ingrid turned to the blue drapes. Grayson never had quite grasped how to gracefully shut a door.
The drapes swished aside and her twin stepped into the sitting room. His dark blue eyes settled on their father immediately. His blond hair was a tousled mess, his jaw tight, nostrils flaring. Grayson still held one panel of the drapes in his clenched fist.
“I half expected you to have disappeared again,” their father said to him.
He still believed Grayson had driven their mother into a panic last December when he’d gone out carousing, sending no word at all. Grayson had actually been a prisoner in the demon realm, but of course their father couldn’t know that.
“Grayson has taken charge of the abbey’s repairs,” Lady Brickton offered, slipping into her role as ambassadress between warring father and son. She would have a new role now: protector of her children’s secrets.
Lord Brickton gave a sarcastic snort, the kind he reserved for anything he found ridiculous or a waste of time. Ingrid flicked her gaze back to Grayson. She couldn’t be sure that it actually had happened, but for the briefest moment, she thought she saw a ripple of color roll over the whites of his eyes, turning them pale rose. In a flash, it was gone, and Grayson quickly averted his gaze, staring at the floor.
“The architects will be here Monday,” he said to their mother, ignoring their father’s presence completely. “The restorers can’t begin on the final stained-glass panel until next week, and they think the rose window will need more time than they predicted.”
The report floated out into the dead silence. Finally, their mother cleared her throat and thanked him. Grayson didn’t spare them another moment. He turned on his heel and disappeared through the drapes, into the foyer, and back out the front door. Slamming it yet again.
Ingrid let out the breath she’d been holding.