Archangel's Consort

“He is adept at being unseen.”


“Most men would choose a painting of a nude for the bedroom,” she teased. “You chose a hunter with knives.”

“You are the only woman al owed in my bedroom, Elena.”

That she was loved . . . it was wonder enough. That she was loved by this man, it was beyond wonder. And it gave her the wil to step back into the darkness. “I need to tel you what I found at the school.”

He listened in quiet. “You plan to liaise with Dmitri, confirm if they located the second body?”

“Yes.” Frustrated anger had her fisting her hand against his back. “It wasn’t a coincidence that the vampire picked that school was it, Raphael?”

His answer destroyed her final ephemeral hopes. “No. It cannot be.”





7


Less than an hour later, Elena found herself at the city morgue, looking down at the heartbreaking evidence of why Ignatius had spil ed innocent blood. The girl who lay on the slab had been named Betsy, an old-fashioned name for someone so young. But maybe she’d liked it. Elena would never know. Because Betsy’s throat had been torn out, coloring the bed where she’d gone to lie down a violent crimson.

They’d found her discarded in the woods not far from the pond, a bare few feet from where Elena had hesitated during the tracking.

“She was a day student, didn’t have a bed at the school,” Dmitri told her from where he stood on the other side of the body. “Her teacher sent her to the infirmary after she complained of a stomachache, but Betsy’s best friend had a room at the school. It looks like she snuck in there instead. In the confusion, everyone thought the nurse had sent her home.”

“Evelyn,” Elena said, as she took in the smal heart-shaped face surrounded by hair of a brown so dark it could be mistaken for black. According to the file, Betsy’s eyes had been a deep gray before death had stolen a film of dul ness over them. “She looks like my youngest sister.” And the bed saturated with Betsy’s lifeblood had been Evelyn’s.

That was why Betsy was dead.

“I need to make a cal .” She fisted her hand against the urge to touch Betsy’s pale skin in futile hope—there was no longer any warmth there, no longer any life. It had been irrevocably stolen.

As she watched, Dmitri reached out to tug the sheet over Betsy’s face with a tenderness that made a knot form in Elena’s throat. “I’l organize discreet surveil ance on your sisters,” he said, his tone so very even that she knew it was a mask.

Nodding, she stepped out into the cold, crisp light of the corridor, and col apsed against the wal . The shakes took time to pass. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the girl who would never again laugh or cry or run ... and to the one who would soon be told that her best friend was dead.

Then she stiffened her spine and used her cel phone to cal a number she’d avoided since waking from the coma. Her father picked up on the first ring.

“Yes?” A curt demand.

“Hel o, Jeffrey.”

His silence was eloquent. He didn’t like it when she used his name—but he’d lost the right to any familial address the day he’d told her she was an

“abomination,” a pol utant in the il ustrious Deveraux family tree. “Elieanora,” he said, his tone pure frost. “May I assume the unpleasantness at the girls’

school today had something to do with you?”

Guilt twisted her stomach into knots. “Evelyn may have been the target.” Hand pressed hard against the chipped paint of the wal , she told him the rest.

“Her best friend, Betsy, was murdered. You must know how alike they look . . . looked.”

“Yes.”

“Evelyn needs to be told. The names wil leak to the media soon enough.”

“I’l have her mother speak to her.” Another pause. “The girls wil be tutored at home until you sort out whatever mess you’ve created this time.”

It was a direct hit, and she took it. Because he was right. The two youngest Deveraux girls were in the line of fire because of her. “That’s probably for the best.” She didn’t know what else to say, how to speak to this man who had once been her father and was now a stranger who seemed to want only to hurt her.

In the days after she’d woken from the coma, she’d remembered forgotten pieces of her childhood, remembered the father she’d loved al those years ago. Jeffrey had held her hand in the hospital after her two older sisters had been murdered in that blood-soaked kitchen, led her down to the basement in spite of bitter opposition so she could see Ari and Bel e again—she’d needed to be certain that her sisters real y did rest in peace, that the monster hadn’t made them like him. He’d cried that day. Her father, the man with a stone-cold heart, had cried. Because he’d been a different man.

As she’d been a different girl.

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