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 rest? Marguerite? The mistress he’d once kept who’d been a faded copy of Elena’s mother? The man Jeffrey had been with his first wife and daughters?
That would stay forever between Elena and her father. There was no need to force generous, loving Gwendolyn to face the depth of Jeffrey’s devotion to Marguerite. Elena had not a single doubt that she knew all of it already—Gwendolyn was too bright for it to be otherwise—but there was a big difference between knowing and being told the confronting truth by Jeffrey’s eldest living daughter.
It would just hurt her.
Enough people in their family had already been hurt. Elena wasn’t going to inflict more wounds—especially when she knew that no matter what, Gwendolyn would stand by Jeffrey.
Because as Marguerite had been the center of Jeffrey’s world, Jeffrey was the center of Gwendolyn’s.
What a mess.
“But it’s our mess, isn’t it?” she murmured to Jeffrey as the rain faded away to leave the world quiet. “Our complicated, bruised, and damaged family.”
Her father slept on, his expression so at peace that it terrified her.
14
Deep in the earth, Cassandra stirred, her wing brushing Qin’s. His choice had brought her consciousness to the surface, and neither he nor she had yet fallen all the way into true Sleep.
“We can’t do this for long,” she reminded him.
“Long enough.” His fingers touched hers, and for this moment in time, they were together in a world without grief.
It was the only way they’d found to be together over the eons since her “gift” stole her future by showing her too much of it. “We are greedy,” she found herself saying to him. “We had more than a single mortal lifetime together.”
“But we are not mortal, beloved. We should’ve had millennia.” His lips brushing over her knuckles, a phantom kiss in her dreams.
Her eyes burned and she turned, looked at him, her Qin so beautiful and so haunted. Her ability to see the future hadn’t claimed just her own life and sanity. “How long can you stay with me?” Unlike the others over whom she kept watch, Qin wasn’t wounded. Qin had chosen his Sleep.
“As long as they’ll permit me.”
They.
Qin had always believed that the Cascade and other matters of angelic power were controlled by the Ancestors. He didn’t think any of it was random. Especially the unknown factor that always, always tore them apart in the midst of Sleep. They’d go to the earth in each other’s arms, and awaken oceans apart.
But not straightaway.
“You look so tired, my heart.” She ran her fingers over his cheekbones, sharp and fine, the angle of them as acute as that of his eyes.
Her owls fluttered around them, enchanted by him. Of all the people in the world, Qin alone was the only other being with whom they would not just manifest but play. Once, in another life, she’d found him in a forest clearing. His hair had been an obsidian fall to his shoulders, his wings in all their watercolor glory tucked close to his back so as not to get in the way of her owls.
He’d been laughing as owl after golden-eyed owl landed on his shoulders and outstretched arms.
Oh, but her Qin was poetry itself when he laughed.
He turned in to her touch today, his eyelashes shadowing his cheeks. “I could Sleep for eons, but I rest only when I am with you.”
A tear trickled down her cheek as within her the forces of foresight began to howl.
Cupping the side of her face with one long-fingered hand, his eyes a hypnotic black with glowing striations the hue of his sea aurora, he said, “No, not yet.”
“No.” She closed her hand over his. “I can fight it yet.” Whatever the future that bloomed in the slipstreams of time, it wasn’t powerful enough to wrench away her senses and her sanity.
Wasn’t powerful enough to make her lose her Qin all over again.
But it was growing in strength with every hour that passed, until one day soon, it would be a tide hauling her resisting mind out into the slipstream . . . and away from the man who had been made for her by time itself.
15
A sea of grim faces met Raphael’s and Aegaeon’s as they stood in Qin’s communications room. There was no reason not to use it now that they knew Qin was gone. Any spies of his court would now be in limbo—and to spy on a meeting of the Cadre was an act no spymaster would countenance regardless.
Located underneath his home, the room was paneled in black, with a far cooler ambient temperature than the tropical heat that lapped against the external part of the building.
“There’s more bad news.” Zanaya’s words were unwelcome boulders rolling atop them. “I’ve just had word that two lost mortal villagers blundered into the far edge of the protected zone around the Refuge.”