"I choose not to sleep with Michaela because I have no liking for black widows. Her poisonous whispers probably helped drive Uram to this."
She sat up, gripping his forearms. "This? What is this?"
His thumbs continued to move, touching the very edge of exquisitely sensitive flesh that ached for a harder, deeper caress. "You don't need to know."
A flash of fury overlaid the lust. "I can't work blind."
"Treat him as a vampire, the most dangerous vampire in the known universe." One of his thumbs pressed against her *oris. "Now, take off your pants."
She fought to draw in air. "Fat chance. Tell me about Uram."
He pushed closer, his wings brushing her knees. Then, to her disappointment, he moved one of his hands . . . only to thrust it up under her T-shirt.
Her heart ricocheted around her chest as he cupped her breast, but she forced out the words. "Why can I scent him now when I couldn't before?"
Raphael slid his hand off her breast, back over her thigh and to her knee. The other hand he slid below her own arm to place palm down behind her, his biceps brushing her breast. "Because"-he lifted her leg, hooking it around his waist as he pulled her forward-"he drew first blood." Their lower bodies came into direct contact and she couldn't help it. She moaned.
"But," she said through the haze, "I wasn't able to scent Erik, the just-Made vamp."
"I misled you at the time, Elena. Both Bernal and Erik were Made around the same time-but Bernal was allowed to feed, while Erik wasn't, not until after the test."
That Raphael had been able to curb the bloodhunger of one of the just-Made was another example of his sheer power, but Erik wasn't the one she wanted to talk about. "Why? Why did Uram turn vampire?"
"He's still an archangel." Rocking her against him, he shoved up her T-shirt, bent his head, and bit her nipple through her bra.
She jerked, pulling at his hair. "Stop that." But he was sucking now and oh, damn, it felt good. Like he'd be the best sex she'd ever imagined, much less had. "Raphael."
He raised his head. "I'll give you a choice."
She pushed her T-shirt back into place, feeling way too vulnerable. Her nipple ached in the most sexual way. "Yeah?"
"Either I splay you out on the table and drive my cock into you, or-"
"-or?" She wanted to snuggle up to him, taste the tendons in his neck.
"Or, I splay you out on the table and lick you to your pleasure, then drive into you."
"Gee." She was having trouble thinking past the needy pulse between her legs. "I choose option c."
He settled her back against his erection with the arm around her back. "There is no option c."
Oh, to hell with it. She leaned in and grazed that beautiful throat with her teeth. A girl had to live. His arm tightened as she sucked, as she tasted. Then he said, "Does option c involve you sucking on other parts of my anatomy?"
Damn, but the archangel could be sexy when he wasn't in a killing frame of mind. Giving a last, regretful lick, she pushed away. "I'm not f*cking you, not until you tell me the truth about Uram."
Something dark crawled across his face. "Sexual blackmail, Elena?"
She snorted. "You treat me like a pet. Go fetch the bad archangel/vampire/whatever the f*ck he is, Ellie, but don't you dare ask me why. It'd be too much for your little human head." Dropping the saccharine-sweet tone, she glared. "I don't sleep with men who think I'm a brainless twit."
That lethal darkness turned to amusement but she was aware she was skating a razor-thin edge. Raphael was indulging her for reasons of his own. The archangel who'd forced her to close her hand over a knife blade was also Raphael and she'd do well to remember that-no matter how badly she lusted after him.
"The more you know," he said, "the bigger a liability you become."
"I already know too much." She held her ground. "This isn't about protecting me-it's about protecting the archangels."
"To trust a mortal is the ultimate in foolishness. It's what cost Illium his feathers."
Oh, he knew exactly how to get to her. "I'm not just a mortal. I'm Elena Deveraux, Guild Hunter and the woman you pulled into this shit. The least you can do is tell me why."
"No." A flat declaration made by the Archangel of New York. "Nothing you say will sway me. No mortal can know. Not even the one I want to f*ck."
The cold place had filled with lust. Now it filled with pure fury. "That puts me in my place, doesn't it?"
The bastard kissed her. She was so mad, she bit him hard enough to draw blood. Raphael pulled back, lip already beginning to swell. "We are no longer even, Elena. You're now in debt."
"You can deduct it from my slow and painful death." She dropped her leg from his waist. "It's time to talk murder."
He leaned in, caging her with his arms. "You're holding a knife again."
She clenched her hand around the handle. "You drive me to violence." Sliding the knife back into her boot, she folded her arms and tried not to think about how good he smelled. "What did you do with the survivor?"
"Dmitri has taken her to our healers, our doctors."
"Because she might be infected. With what?"
"Uram's madness."
She was so shocked at getting a straight answer that it took her close to a minute to respond. "That's not possible. Madness isn't catching."
"Uram's brand may be."
Christ. "But she's human."
Raphael's eyes flamed cobalt. "She was. Now the doctors will tell us what she's become." He paused. "We know she ingested some of Uram's blood-it could've been by accident but more likely, he made her feed from him."
She didn't give in to pity. That woman-girl, really-had survived a monster intent on destroying everything she was. She deserved a f*cking medal for courage, not pity. "If she is infected, will you kill her?"
"Yes."
Elena wanted to hate him for that, but she couldn't. "Four years ago," she found herself saying, "there was a rash of killings on the banks of the Mississippi. Young boys strangled; their eyes removed."
"A human."
"Yes. A hunter." Bill James had been her friend once upon a time, her trainer before that. "We-me, Ransom, and Sara-had to find and execute him." Hunters always took care of their own.
A cool whisper of a breeze as Raphael unfurled his wings and curled them back in. "So many nightmares in your head."
"They make me who I am."
"Did you kill this hunter?"
"Yes." It had come down to the two of them. "Sara was badly injured, Ransom too far away, and Bill was about to kill a terrified young boy. So I stabbed him through the heart." No time to get her gun, so much blood everywhere, the look of betrayal in Bill's eyes as his heart pulsed one last time, a chaos of memory. Now she looked up into another pair of eyes. "If that girl's become a monster, she needs to die."
"Am I a monster, Elena?"
She looked into that perfect face and saw the echoes of cruelty, of time. "Not yet," she whispered. "But you could be."
His jaw was a harsh line. "It's a symptom of age-cruelty."
It hurt her to know that the humanity in Raphael-buried deep, but there-might one day cease to exist. Yet at the same time, she couldn't help but be glad for his immortality. Someone this magnificent shouldn't die. "Tell me about the Quiet."
His wings extended to their full width. "We must go to Michaela's home and see if you can pick up a scent-there's a good chance he spent hours watching her before today."
She blew out a frustrated breath. "Fine. We flying?" Her heart hitched-she was becoming used to being carried in Raphael's arms, the sound of his wings steady and powerful.
"No," he said, lips curving as if he'd read her excitement. "Michaela's American home is next door."
"Convenient." For sneaking into Raphael's bed.
He finally moved enough that she could hop down. "Michaela has been many things through the centuries-scholar, courtesan, muse-but she's never been a warrior."
My lovers have always been warrior women.
She wondered how many of those women had been as foolish as her-foolish enough to walk into his arms knowing that if push came to shove, the archangel would end her life with a single, final thought. "It's time for this warrior to earn her keep."
Bloodlust
He was sluggish, sated, the blood heavy in his gut.
He'd overindulged, but what glorious overindulgence it had been.
Dipping his fingers into the bowl of blood he'd saved from the cattle he'd butchered, he brought them to his mouth and licked.
Flat. Lifeless.
Disappointed, he smashed the bowl to the floor, spreading a dark red stain on the white carpet. But there was still the beauty above. He looked up, even as the dull heaviness in his limbs began to lighten, turning into a slow kind of anticipation.
Now he knew-the blood had to be fresh.
Next time, he'd take it straight from their beating hearts. His eyes grew red with violent hunger. Yes, next time, he wouldn't kill . . . he'd keep.
Elena wasn't the least surprised when Michaela's mansion turned out to be a place of beauty and grace. The archangel might be a two-faced bitch, but she hadn't earned her reputation as the muse of artists across the ages by accident.
"This was where we found the . . . gift," the vampire guard told her, pointing to a patch of bloodstained grass.
The bite of acid was sharp here despite the other vampire's presence. Either Uram had mingled some of his own blood with the hearts, or he'd landed on the lawn itself. Talk about brazen . . . and creepy. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. "Can you move out of the immediate area?"
He gave a short nod but didn't take a step. "I was hunted once."
Elena looked up to where she could see Raphael and Michaela talking on a high balcony overlooking the lawn, and wondered if either angel would mind if she simply coldcocked the idiot at her side-she didn't have time to deal with this kind of shit. "Can't have been too bad if you're still here."
"My mistress flayed the skin off my back and made it into a purse."
She wondered how well that info would go down with the faction who ascribed heavenly origins to the angels. "Yet you serve her even now." It sounded like something the bitch goddess would do.
The vampire smiled, showed teeth. "It was a very nice purse." Then he finally walked away. She'd have to watch her back around that one, she thought. Whatever else Michaela had done to him over the centuries, he was no longer all there.
"Immortality has way too many drawbacks," she muttered, adding the possibility of becoming a purse to her mental list. Her eye fell on the bloody grass again. Kneeling, she confirmed the scent, then began walking out in ever-increasing circles.
Uram's scent blanketed the area. The archangel had most certainly touched down, standing there cloaked in glamour while Michaela's guards remained clueless. Elena would've worried about running into him, but the scent, while pervasive, wasn't as strong as it would've been had he been in the immediate vicinity. That made her wonder-were other archangels able to sense their brethren through the glamour?
If not, no wonder Michaela was spooked.
Unsurprisingly, the scent was particularly intense near the edge of the lawn. Looking up, Elena found herself with a direct line of sight into the bank of windows on the third floor. Michaela's bedroom was smack in the middle.
If this had been an ordinary hunt, Elena would've been grinning ear to ear by now. With this recent a trail, she could've run her prey to ground by sundown. But vampires didn't fly. Still, she thought, eyes narrowed, now she knew Uram's Achilles' heel. His compulsion toward Michaela would constrict the breadth of his hunting grounds. She glanced up again, her mind pure, focused hunter. She needed the map of Michaela's movements that Raphael had promised to get.
Raphael was aware of Elena moving farther and farther away as she performed a methodical search. He kept his eye out for Riker, Michaela's favorite guard. Riker did whatever Michaela told him to-it would make no difference to the vampire that Elena was under Raphael's protection . . . though he probably should've killed her the second he recovered from the shooting. Because if Lijuan was right, then Elena was his fatal weakness.
Death was a concept he hadn't considered in centuries. But Elena had made him a little bit mortal. As she was. She'd die if Riker tore out her throat. And Michaela was capricious enough to have given such an order. She knew Raphael wouldn't start a war over a mortal.
Destiny's Rose.
An image of the ancient treasure danced in his head. In all his centuries of existence, he'd never once considered giving it away. Until Elena. His mortal. Perhaps he'd fight Michaela over her after all. "You have safeguards in place?"
"Of course."
Those safeguards were obviously not enough-the entire Cadre had expected Uram to come for her, and yet she'd been caught unprepared. "Do you need more men? You're far from home."
"No." Pride dripped from the single word as she strode to the edge of the balcony and stared down, following Elena's progress. "If your hunter has the scent, it means he was watching me long enough to have left a discernible imprint."
Raphael could have asked Elena to confirm, but after the incident that had led to the Quiet, he was making an attempt to stay out of her head. A sign of the weakness Lijuan had warned of-an attack of human scruples? Perhaps. But Raphael had never liked what he became in the Quiet. And this time . . . it had been a fraction too close to Caliane's madness. "You're still as you were?" he asked, burying that ancient memory.
Michaela's skin tightened, the sharp lines of her bones almost cutting through her skin. "I'm an archangel without glamour, yes."
"Unfortunate."
She laughed, a low sound designed to make men think of sex. The first time he'd seen Michaela, she'd had her mouth on the cock of the archangel who'd ruled ancient Byzantium. Her eyes had met his as she drove the archangel to his little death and Raphael had known she would one day rule. Two decades later, the Archangel of Byzantium was dead.
His eyes picked out Elena as she entered the wooded area that divided his property from Michaela's. "Have you spoken to Lijuan about it?" he asked, even as he watched Elena purse her lips in concentration. Her mouth was lush, seductive. He was very interested in having it all over his body. But like all warrior women, she'd have to be tamed to his hand.
"She talks in riddles," Michaela spit out, "has no explanation for why the glamour eludes me."
Under normal circumstances, that lack wouldn't be much of a concern-Michaela had other skills, some known, some not, but no one could doubt her status as archangel. However, in this one situation, she was at a lethal disadvantage, because along with glamour came an immunity to it. Raphael couldn't hide from Uram but the Angel of Blood couldn't hide from him either. "Call Riker back."
"Why?"
"You can't see Uram, but Elena can scent him."
Michaela's next words were dismissive. "Riker is watching her, nothing more. And there are other hunters if he loses control." A pause. "She's human, Raphael. She knows nothing of the pleasures I could show you."
Raphael flared out his wings in preparation for flight. "I would have thought Charisemnon would appeal. He was your lover once."
Green eyes met his as he went to the very edge of a balcony made for angels-no railing, nothing to prevent a deadly fall. "But you I've never tasted. I can do things that will make eternity an erotic dream."
"The trouble is, your lovers seem to have very short life spans." He flew down, across the yard, and over the wooded area.
Riker was standing a few feet from Elena, his smile full of menace.
Far from appearing frightened, Elena was flicking a knife through her fingers, her stance that of someone trained in hand-to-hand combat. As she opened her mouth as if to speak, Raphael flew down to land behind Riker, one hand on the vampire's shoulder, the other on his back.
"This is my territory," he said. "Your mistress is a guest." That was all the warning he gave before he thrust his hand through Riker's clothing, flesh, and muscle to grip his panicked heart. A second later, that heart was in Raphael's hand and Riker was twitching facedown on the ground.
"Why?"
He looked up to meet Elena's horrified gaze over the continued pulse of Riker's vampire heart. "There are boundaries. It's better for mortals and immortals alike if those boundaries are not crossed."
Her grip on the knife was white-knuckled. "So you killed him?"
Raphael dropped the heart to the ground and looked at his bloody hand, wondering if Uram had taken his victims' hearts the same way. "He's not dead."
"I-" She swallowed as he approached, took a step back. "I know they can heal a hell of a lot of damage but completely removing the heart?"
"You fear me again." He hadn't seen that look on her face since that first meeting on the roof.
"You just ripped a vampire's heart out with your bare hand." Her voice echoed with shock. "So yes, I fear you."
He looked down at the blood coating his skin. "I wouldn't do this to you, Elena."
"You saying my death will be short and sweet?"
"Perhaps instead of killing you," he said, "I'll make you my slave instead."
"I hope to hell that's your twisted idea of a joke." Biting words, but she put away the knife. "We might as well head back so you can wash off the blood. I've lost the trail anyway."
"He flew?"
"I'm guessing, yes." She folded her arms, nodded toward Michaela's house. "You get the map of her movements?"
"It'll be delivered within the next hour." As they walked, he wondered why a mortal's opinion of him mattered. "Do you plan to walk those streets and see if you can sense him?"
"Yes." She strode forward with determined steps. "If he's as fixated as you guys think-and hell, he is wooing her with bloody hearts-he won't go far from her."
"No, he won't." The bloodborn always killed another angel before devolving completely. In most cases, it was the angel who had been closest to them-a macabre sacrament, as if they were cutting away everything they'd once been.
Elena nodded. "Then we might be able to beard him in his lair while he's sluggish from the amount of blood he took. Unless that's different with you lot?" She glanced at him, her eyes sliding to his bloody hand and forearm before she sucked in a breath and looked away.
"From what we know," he said, hand curling into a fist, "the bloodborn-"
"Bloodborn?" She scowled. "You have a name for whatever it is Uram's become? That means it's not an isolated incident."
"The bloodborn," he said, ignoring her implied question, "are affected as the vampires are by overindulgence. He'll be lazy, sleepy, vulnerable."
Elena's fury at his refusal to answer her question was un-hidden, but whatever it was that she might've said was lost as her cell phone rang. Pulling it out of a pocket, she flipped it open. "Yes." Her eyes turned chaotic. "What?" A pause. "I-" For the first time, he saw her look unsure. "Yes. I'll be there." She closed the phone. "I need to take off for a while. I'll be back by the time Michaela delivers her map."
"Where?" he asked, disliking the expression on her face.
A hard glance. "None of your damn business."
He should've been angry. Part of him, the part with over a thousand years of accumulated arrogance, was. But the rest of him was intrigued. "A taste of my own medicine?"
She shrugged, her mouth pinched.
"Your father."
Her shoulders tightened. "What, you can listen in to conversations now?"
"Even archangels can't do that." Not always true, but true in this case since he'd vowed not to eavesdrop on her mind. "But I did my research."
"Good for you." If words could cut, he'd have been shredded.
He looked down at his bloody fist and wondered if she saw him as a monster now. "Jeffrey Deveraux is the only human being you seem unable to handle."
"Like I said, it's none of your business." Her jaw was clenched so tight, she had to be in pain.
"Are you sure?"
Raphael's question repeated over and over in Elena's head as she strode up the steps to the tony brownstone her father maintained as his private office. There was another office high up in a tower of steel and glass, but this was where the real wheeling and dealing went on. It was also a place you entered only by invitation.
Elena had never set foot across the threshold.
Now she stopped in front of the closed door, her eye falling on the discreet metal plaque to the left.
VEVERAUX ENTERPRISES, EST. 1701
The Deveraux family could trace their roots back so many years, Elena sometimes thought they must've kept records even while crawling out of the primordial ooze. Her lips tightened. Pity the other side of her familial ledger wasn't so established. An orphaned immigrant raised in foster homes on the outskirts of Paris, Marguerite had had no family history to speak of-nothing beyond the vague memory of her mother's Moroccan origins. But she'd been beautiful, her skin gold, her hair close to pure white.
And her hands . . . gifted hands, hands that wove magic.
Elena had never been able to understand why her parents had married. Most likely, she never would. The parent who might have told her was dead and the one who remained seemed to have forgotten he'd once had a wife named Marguerite, a woman who spoke with an accent and laughed loud enough to banish any silence.
She wondered if her father ever thought about Ariel and Mirabelle, or if he'd erased them from his world, too.
Ari's eyes staring into hers as she screamed. Belle's blood on the kitchen tiles. Her bare foot sliding on the liquid, the jarring hardness of the floor as she fell. Warm wetness against her palm.
A hand clutching a still-beating heart.
She shook her head in a harsh negative, trying to wipe away the mishmash of nauseating images. What Raphael had done . . . it had been another reminder that he wasn't human, wasn't anything close to human. But the Archangel of New York wasn't the monster she'd come to face.
Raising her hand, she pressed the buzzer and looked up at the discreet security camera most execs probably never made. The door opened a second later. It wasn't Jeffrey on the other side. Elena hadn't expected it to be. Her father was much too important a man to open the door for his eldest living child. Even when he hadn't seen that child for ten cold years.
"Ms. Deveraux?" A perfunctory smile from the small brunette. "Please come in."
Elena stepped inside, taking in the woman's ghost-pale skin against the sedate navy color of her well-cut suit. She was every inch the executive assistant, the lone touches of flamboyance coming from the glittering diamond on her right middle finger, and the high mandarin collar of her jacket. Elena drew in a deep breath, felt her lips curve.
The woman's spine went stiff. "I'm Geraldine, Mr. Deveraux's personal assistant."
"Elena." She shook the woman's hand, noted the cool temperature. "I'd suggest you get yourself a prescription for iron."
Geraldine's calm expression flickered only slightly. "I'll take that under advisement.'
"You do that." Elena wondered if her father had any idea of his assistant's extracurricular pursuits. "My father?"
"Please follow me." A hesitation. "He doesn't know." Not a plea, almost an angry declaration made in clipped private-school vowels.
"Hey, what you do in your own time is nobody's business but yours." Elena shrugged, mind filling with the image of Dmitri bending over that blonde's neck. Of the hunger in his eyes after she cut his throat. "I just hope it's worth it."
The other woman gave a soft, intimate smile before leading Elena down the hall. "Oh, it is. It's better than anything you could imagine."
Elena doubted that, not when she kept flashing back to Raphael's hand on her breast, powerful, possessive, more than a little dangerous. Too bad she couldn't forget that same hand shoving through a man's rib cage to tear out his heart.
Geraldine halted in front of a closed wooden door. She gave a quiet knock and drew back. "Please go in. Your father is waiting for you."
"Thank you." She put her hand on the doorknob.
Jeffrey Deveraux stood by the fireplace, hands in the pockets of a pin-striped suit she guessed had been tailored to his tall frame. Marguerite had been a bare five feet tall. It was Jeffrey who'd given Elena her height. He was six feet four without shoes-not that her father was ever anything less than perfectly put together.
Pale gray eyes met hers with the cold watchfulness of a hawk or a wolf. His face was all sharp lines and angles, his hair brushed back from a severe widow's peak. Most men would've had gray in their hair by now. Jeffrey had gone straight from aristocratic gold to pure white. It suited him, throwing his features into sharper relief.
"Elieanora." He finished polishing his spectacles and slid them back on, the thin rectangular frames as effective as ten-inch-thick walls.
"Jeffrey."
His mouth tightened. "Don't be childish. I'm your father."
She shrugged, shifting into an unconsciously aggressive posture. "You wanted me. Here I am." The words came out angry. Ten years of independence and the second she entered her father's presence, she reverted to teenager who'd spent a lifetime begging for his love and been kicked in the guts for her efforts.
"I'm disappointed," he said, unmoved. "I'd hoped you'd picked up some social graces from the company you've been keeping."
She frowned. "My company is the same as always. You'll have seen Sara, the Guild Director, at various events, and Ransom-"
"What your hunter"-said with a grimace of distaste-"friends do is of no interest to me."
"I didn't think so." Why the f*ck had she come to heel at his command? Her only excuse was shock. "So why did you bring them up?"
"I was referring to the angels."
She blinked, then wondered why she was surprised. Jeffrey had a finger in every major pie in the city, not all of them strictly legal. Though of course, he'd flay her alive if she dared imply he was anything other than lily-white. "You'd be surprised at what they consider acceptable." Raphael's pitiless justice, Michaela's hungry sexuality, Uram's butchery, none of it would fit with her father's perception of the angels.
He waved off her words as if they didn't matter. "I need to talk to you about your inheritance."
Elena's fist clenched. "You mean the trust my mother set up for me." She could've starved on the streets and Jeffrey wouldn't have given a damn.
Skin pulled taut over Jeffrey's cheekbones. "I suppose genetics do tell."
She was one step away from calling him a bastard but ironically, it was her mother's voice that held her back. Marguerite had brought her up to respect her father. Elena couldn't do that, but she could respect her mother's memory. "Thank God," she said, letting him take the insult as he would.
Swiveling, Jeffrey walked to the desk set below the windows on the other side of the room, his steps silent on the deep claret of the Persian carpet. "The trust matured on your twenty-fifth birthday."
"A bit late, aren't you?"
He picked up an envelope. "A letter was sent to you by the solicitors."
Elena recalled throwing the unopened piece of mail in the trash. She'd figured it for yet another attempt at coercing her into selling out the shares she'd inherited in the family firm-through her paternal grandfather, a man who'd actually seemed to love her. "They did a real knock-up job of following up."
"Don't try to pass off your own laziness on others." Walking back, he shoved the envelope into her hand. "The money's been deposited in an interest-bearing account under your name. The details are all there."
She didn't look down. "Why the personal touch?"
Pale gray eyes narrowed behind the spectacles. "Distasteful as I find your choice of occupation-"
"It's not a choice," she said coldly. "Remember?"
Silence that warned her to never again bring up that bloody day.
"As I was saying, regretful as your profession is, it does bring you into contact with some powerful people."
Her stomach soured. What the hell had she expected? She knew she meant nothing to her father. Still she'd come. Instead of lashing out as she might've done as a teenager, she kept her mouth shut, wanting to know exactly what it was he expected of her.
"You're in a position to help the family." A steely-eyed gaze. "Something you've never cared to do."
Her hand clenched on the envelope. "I'm only a hunter," she said, turning his words back on him. "What makes you think they treat me any better than you do?"
He didn't flinch. "I've been told you're spending considerable time with Raphael, that he may be open to suggestions that come from you."
She told herself he wasn't implying what she thought he was implying. Shaking inside, she met his eyes. "You'd whore out your own daughter?"
No change in his expression. "No. But if she's already doing it herself, I see no reason not to take advantage."
She felt herself go sheet white. Without a word, she turned, opened the door, and walked out. It slammed shut behind her. A second later, she heard something smash, the discordant splintering of crystal against brick. She halted, stunned at the thought that she'd evoked any kind of a response from the always controlled Jeffrey Deveraux.
"Ms. Deveraux?" Geraldine came running around the corner. "I heard . . ." Her voice trailed off uncertainly.
"I'd suggest you make yourself scarce for the next little while," Elena said, snapping out of her frozen state and heading toward the door. Jeffrey had probably lost it because she'd dared defy him, unlike the rest of his band of sycophants. It had had nothing to do with the fact that he'd called his daughter a whore to her face. "And, Gerry"-she turned at the door-"don't ever let him find out."