A bitter laugh. “She wouldn’t have needed to be if I’d been there that day.”
This conversation wasn’t going as she’d predicted, and she felt scared, lost, a child again. Gripping at the doorjamb, she thought back to that fateful day when everything had fractured, remembered that her daddy had been missing. “You went to pick Beth up from her sleepover.” She’d always been grateful for the kindness of fate that meant her sister had been spared the butcher’s attention.
A cold gray glance from behind those clear spectacles. “I had a fight with Marguerite, went off to clear my head, picked your sister up later than I should have.”
Elena’s whole world began to spin.
“We fought because I thought she was too flighty. I wanted her to be a businessman’s wife ...”
“When she was a butterfly,” Elena whispered, knowing that in spite of his harsh words, her father had loved his first wife, loved her in a way that he’d never again loved anyone else.
“Sweetheart, this cake looks delicious.”
Marguerite laughing and tugging on Jeffrey’s sedate tie to pull him down for a passionate kiss. “The cake looks atrocious and you know it, mon mari.”
A smile that turned her father into the most handsome man in the world. “Ah, but the cook is definitely delicious.”
Even as the fragment of memory tumbled unbidden into her mind from some secret hiding place, Jeffrey straightened, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his suit pants. She knew the moment was gone before he spoke. “Have you come to tel me that more of your new friends wil be coming to harm your sisters?”
She flinched. “They’re under constant protection.”
Jeffrey didn’t look at her. “I’l make sure word gets out that you’re not a welcome member of this family.”
It was a good precaution, but it also burned like a poker searing through her heart. “Al right.” Her voice caught, but she didn’t let it break, refusing to crumble in front of this man who couldn’t be the same one who’d held her hand in that hospital morgue almost two decades in the past. “I’l make sure any meetings I have with Eve are at the Guild from now on. No reason for anyone to question my presence there.”
Jeffrey said nothing.
Turning, Elena went to leave.
“Elieanora.”
She froze with her hand on the doorknob. “Yes?”
“Of al my children, you have always been the most like me.”
Repudiating the thought with every part of her, she walked out of the house without looking back. Raphael was there to pul her up into the sky until she’d gained enough altitude to fly. And fly they did, as she tried to bury her father’s words deep under a mountain of truth.
Elena.
I’m nothing like him! I would never do to my child what he did to his.
Raphael didn’t immediately agree, and his words, when they came, were not what she wanted to hear. You are both survivors, Elena. You chose different methods to do it, but you both did it.
Her lower lip quivered, and she was so frustrated at the sign of weakness that she bit down hard enough to draw blood. He survived by destroying all memory of our family. I hold them here. She slammed a fist to her heart, blinking the rain out of her eyes.
I am not your father’s champion. I would kill him if you would only not hate me afterward, but the fact of his mistress, it argues against your belief.
Dashing away more of the rain . . . and realizing the salty droplets weren’t fal ing from the sky after al , Elena thought of the poor woman Uram had brutalized in his rampage through New York. That light blond hair and golden skin, it had been a pale imitation of her mother’s butterfly beauty ... but an imitation nonetheless. I can’t, she said, a painful lump in the center of her chest, I can’t see him that way.
They’d reached the Tower, and Raphael waited to speak until they’d landed. Taking her into his arms, wings raised to protect her from the driving rain once more, he spoke against her ear. “You may be Jeffrey’s daughter, but you are also Marguerite’s.”
Elena clutched at his back, her fingers digging into him as she buried her face against his chest. “That’s the thing,” she whispered, almost hoping he wouldn’t hear her above the storm. “I hate him for what he is . . . but at least he stuck around.”
A lonely red high-heeled shoe on the cold black-and-white tile. A thin shadow swinging against the wal of the Big House. Those were her last memories of her mother. “At least he didn’t give up when it got too fucking hard. It was hard for al of us! But she left; she chose to leave!”
Her archangel said nothing, simply enfolded her in the circle of his arms and the protection of his wings as the storm raged with relentless fury around them.
Raphael knew his hunter needed time, but he couldn’t give it to her, not today. We must go, Elena, he said too soon. The sky is beginning to clear.