Gwendolyn glanced down the corridor, stepped closer. “I know you don’t think of them as your sisters,” she said in a low, intense tone, “but I need you to stand up for my baby.”
Elena went to ask what the hel was going on when a door opened down the hal . Jeffrey’s tal form appeared a moment later. Dressed in charcoal pants bearing a faint navy pinstripe paired with a white shirt, the buttons undone at the col ar, he was as casual as she’d seen him in the years of her adulthood.
Before ... She remembered the dreams, remembered the laughing paint-covered man who’d thrown her into the air and caught her on a sunny day flavored with the mingled scents of freshly cut grass, ice cream, and burgers. Long before the blood, before the death. Before the silence . . . and the shadow on the wal .
Steeling her spine against the devastating impact of the memories, she met his gaze, shielded as always by the clear glass of his metal-rimmed spectacles. “Why am I here, Jeffrey?” She knew Gwendolyn would say nothing now. Having seen them in public, she understood very wel who held the reins.
It was nothing like the marriage Jeffrey had had with Elena’s mother—a woman who’d teased her husband as often as she’d kissed him. A woman whose body might have survived, but whose spirit had broken under the hands of the serial kil er drawn to their smal family home because of Elena. That was a guilt that threatened to turn her feet to lead, leave her defenseless in the face of what was almost certainly going to be a knock-down, drag-out confrontation—her meetings with her father never ended any other way.
“I’m glad to see you have some sense of family obligation,” Jeffrey said in that razor blade of a voice. “I suppose you have had more important people to visit in the days since your return to the city.”
Anger, wild and hurting, slammed through the guilt. “They cared when you threw me out onto the street,” she said, glad to see him flinch. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand that kind of loyalty.” She didn’t know what she’d expected—that her father would be taken aback by her wings to the extent of dropping that glacial mask? That he’d look at her with wonder and awe? If she had, she was a fool.
“Jeffrey.” Gwendolyn’s mel ifluous voice.
Jeffrey’s jaw was tight, his eyes glittering behind those thin metal frames, but he gave a jerky nod, said, “Come into the study. The girls?” The latter words were directed at his wife.
“In Amy’s room, with strict instructions not to come out.”
The tendons along Jeffrey’s neck went white with strain, but he said nothing as he walked into the study. Elena fol owed at a slower pace, wondering at the undercurrents she could sense. Maybe she’d been wrong about Gwendolyn. It certainly seemed like the other woman was flexing her claws.
Chewing on that, she found herself in a large room with mahogany bookshelves lined with leather-bound tomes, a solid desk of the same wood taking center stage. That stil left plenty of room for the deep armchairs set to one side, near the French doors. It wasn’t only a masculine room, it was devoid of even the slightest feminine touch.
Snick.
The sound of the lock clicking into place as Gwendolyn closed the door was loud in the silence. Needing space, Elena walked to the French doors and swung them open, shifting to lean against the doorjamb, one of her wings exposed to the crisp spring air, the other to the emotional chil inside the library.
Jeffrey stood on the other side of the room, against a bookshelf, his arms folded. “So, you’re an angel.”
“I’m afraid asking me to whore myself for you isn’t going to work any better this time than it did the last,” Elena snapped out, her calm disappearing in the face of that judgmental gaze.
White lines bracketed Jeffrey’s mouth. “You’re my daughter. I shouldn’t have had to go through your Guild to find out if you were alive.”
“Please.” Elena gave a bitter laugh. “When have you cared whether I lived or died?” Not once in the ten years of their estrangement had he bothered to check up on her, even when she’d been badly injured in a hunt, hospitalized for weeks. “Just tel me why I’m here so I can get back to my life.”
It was Gwendolyn who spoke from her position by the door, her body held in a way Elena would’ve never expected from Jeffrey’s perfect society wife.
“It’s Evelyn,” she said in a quiet, determined tone. “She’s like you.”
“No.” The single word was gritted out by Jeffrey.
“Stop it.” Gwendolyn turned on her husband. “Denying it won’t make it any less true!”
Jeffrey’s response was lost in the buzz of noise inside Elena’s head as she tried to make sense of the curvebal Gwendolyn had just thrown her. “Like me? How?” She wasn’t going to make any assumptions, not here.