Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112287 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 561(@200wpm)___ 449(@250wpm)___ 374(@300wpm)
The true story was in her reddened eyes and how she’d lost her elegant composure to cling to Elena.
“I’m so sorry.” The woman who was technically Elena’s stepmother scrunched up the tissues into a ball in her hand. “I’ve been trying to hold it together for the girls, but you were never a child to me.” Her pupils bloomed the instant the words were out, her face falling. “Oh, that’s—”
“I understand.” Elena squeezed her fisted hand. “We met as adults.” Not only that, but at two decades Jeffrey’s junior, Gwendolyn had always been too young for any other relationship between them.
“Same way I never saw you as a mother figure,” Elena added, “you never saw me as a kid.” There’d only ever been one maternal figure in Elena’s life, and Marguerite was long dead and buried.
Gwendolyn hadn’t once said or done anything to challenge that state of being; she’d even tried to help mend Elena and Jeffrey’s fractured relationship, never knowing how deep their wounds, how thick the scars.
But he was still Elena’s father.
A piece of a small family that had ended in a river of blood so slick under Elena’s hands and feet, the screams of her sisters and of her mother a nightmare that haunted her to this day.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Her chest compressed at the sound she’d forever associate with that night, and with her sisters’ mutilated and defiled bodies. Blood dripping off a broken finger to fall onto the floor. Over and over again, on the night a monster had walked into their home, called there by Elena’s hunter-born blood.
Pretty, pretty hunter. I’ve come to play with you.
When the monster had left, he’d taken all their happiness with them.
Belle and Ari dead. Marguerite so brutalized in the soul that, though she’d tried, she hadn’t been able to go on.
Elena and Beth and Jeffery might’ve survived, but they’d never been the same again. Jeffrey heartbroken and Elena full of terror, Beth silent and scared and so small and confused. The only mercy was that Beth hadn’t been there that day, hadn’t slipped on the blood, hadn’t run in terror, hadn’t been one more body in the carnage.
Elena had hugged her tight, so tight, when Beth crawled into her bed in the hotel to which Jeffrey had taken them in the immediate aftermath. She’d just wanted to feel her sister’s warmth, listen to her breathe, hear her heartbeat. “You’re squishing me, Ellie,” Beth would complain—but she never wriggled away.
Both of them hanging on to each other with grief-stricken desperation.
Elena’s anger, that had come later. With Marguerite’s choice to leave them—but they’d already been damaged inside by then. Jeffrey most of all.
“How is he?” she forced herself to ask Gwendolyn.
“It’s still touch and go.” The other woman put a hand on Elena’s forearm. “He asked for you before he lost consciousness.” Her gaze, that lovely and ordinarily peaceful dark blue, pleaded with Elena. “ ‘Ellie, get my Ellie,’ he said.”
Her father hadn’t used her nickname for a long, long time. He was the sole person in her life who insisted on addressing her as the long and formal-sounding Elieanora. That he’d changed the habit of her adult lifetime . . .
Her breath caught, her own heart in a painful rhythm. “Can I go in?”
Gwendolyn nodded. “They only allow one visitor at a time. I’ve sent the girls home for the night. None of the three would leave until I used what Eve calls my ‘mom voice.’ ”
That Gwendolyn so naturally included Beth in her definition of the “girls” said a lot about her heart.
“The archangel’s second has been very kind,” Gwendolyn added. “When I called the Tower, I thought the receptionist would take a message, but she put me straight through to him after I gave my name. Said I was on a list?”
“Of course you are, Gwendolyn. You’re my father’s wife. Beth, Amy, Eve, they’re all on the same list.”
Gwendolyn’s smile was shaky, the way she gripped Elena’s hand a silent thank-you for including the two daughters she’d borne Jeffrey. “I thought Dmitri would be intimidating, but he was gentle. He called to tell me he’d managed to get in touch with you, and later to say when you’d be landing. I knew you’d come here straight after.”
Gentle wasn’t a word Elena had ever associated with Dmitri, but then again, he was married to generous and warm-hearted Honor, and even Sam liked him, so maybe it was only to Elena that he was an ass. She was glad he’d pulled out the hidden side of himself for Gwendolyn.
“I’ll stay with Jeffrey now,” she said. “You go home, get some rest.”
Gwendolyn rubbed at her closed eyes. “I know he hasn’t been the best father to you,” she whispered when she opened eyes that were wet again, the capillaries red against the white, “but he does love you. Please remember that.”