Struggling onto the big bed, her blanket around her shoulders, she squirmed between Ari and her mom.
“Hey!” Ari’s protesting voice before she peppered Elena’s giggling face with kisses. “Little grease monkey.”
“Ellie.”
Jerking herself back into the present, Elena pushed down the door, relocking it with fingers that trembled. “I can’t do it.” Her heart was thunder in her throat, her palms damp. “God, I can’t.” She collapsed onto the ground, back to the door.
Sara sank down beside her, uncaring of the damage to her hose. “It’s waited all this time. It’ll wait a while longer.” Putting her hand on Elena’s arm, she squeezed. “You’ve had a hell of a lot to process over the past year and a half. Nothing says you have to rush this.”
“I don’t know why it’s affecting me like this. There are good memories in there.” Except sometimes, she suddenly realized, even the best memories could cut like knives. “Sara,” she said, the words tumbling out, “I need to tell you something about my past.”
“I’m here.”
At that simple statement of support, Elena took a deep breath ... and finally told her best friend about the monster who had broken Ari and Belle until they were macabre dolls in a blood-soaked kitchen; until her mother was a woman who screamed and screamed and screamed; until her father was a stranger who hated his eldest surviving daughter. “I couldn’t tell you before,” she whispered. “I couldn’t even bring myself to think about it.”
Tears streaked Sara’s face. “This is why you used to wake up screaming.”
They’d been roommates at Guild Academy, and after they graduated. “Yes.” Some part of her hadn’t stopped screaming since that murderous day almost two decades in the past.
In spite of Sara’s rock-solid friendship, in spite of the physical release of the intense flying drills she did later that day, Elena couldn’t shake the melancholy that draped her in emotional black. As she stood in the shower prior to getting dressed for dinner, the events of the day came crashing down on her, an unforgiving rain. Even worse than her effective breakdown at the storage unit was the memory of the look of betrayal on Beth’s face as her sister turned away from her.
“I’ll die, Ellie. I’ll die and you’ll still be alive.”
She tried to wash away the pain that twisted through her heart, but it refused to leave. When her eyes smarted, she told herself she’d gotten some shampoo into them and turned her face into the spray. She couldn’t so easily ignore the knowledge that as the years passed, she’d have to watch wrinkles mark a face that had always been younger, and one day, she’d stand over Beth’s grave.
Unable to bear the thought, she wrenched off the water and stepped out . . . into the arms of an archangel. “I’m wet.” The words were snapped out.
He tugged her water-slick body even closer to his. I feel the echo of your pain, Elena.
Distressed as she was, she knew he could’ve taken the reason for that pain from her mind without her being aware of it, was likely battling the compulsion to do exactly that. “It’s nothing,” she said, the hurt too raw to share. “Nothing new.”
A wave of rain and wind inside her mind, the fury of a leashed storm. Your father again?
“No.” That was all she could say without breaking into a thousand splintered pieces. “I can’t talk about it yet, Raphael.”
A pause, heavy with power.
It was an unintended reminder that the man she called her lover, her consort, was nothing even close to human. Still, she didn’t move away, didn’t raise her guard. That, too, was hard ... but Raphael had held her when she fell, prepared to give up his immortal life for her, a hunter, an unwanted daughter . . . and right now, a hated sister.
The stroke of a big, warm hand on her lower back. “Then we will talk at another time. But we will be talking.”
Feeling her instincts shake off the pain that had gutted her, she raised her head. “I thought we discussed the whole you-giving-me-orders thing?”
Endless, relentless blue. “Did we?” Plush softness around her as he wrapped her in a towel, wings and all. “I had a visitor today.”
“You’re changing the subject.” And he looked so very un-apologetic doing it that she knew she was about to let herself get suckered.
A slow smile. “Lijuan.”
Steel-edged worry wiped away every other emotion. “Again?” Ice crawled up her spine at the memory of the devotion and pain she’d seen on the face of one of the reborn who had loved his mistress, thought, too, of how he’d torn a man apart with his bare hands, until the viscera steamed in the open air.
“I knew she remained in my territory,” Raphael said, “but it was still an unexpected visit.”
Letting him rub at her hair with a second towel while she gripped the first between her br**sts, she touched her fingers to the warmth of his chest. “So? What did she want this time?”
Raphael dropped the other towel to the floor and ran his fingers through the damp strands of her hair, his gaze turning a deep, impenetrable cobalt. “The same—to convince me to murder my mother.”
Still blinking in shock half an hour later as she finished drying her hair and turned to pick up the dress that had appeared on the bed, she stared at Raphael. “We have to find your mother before she does, don’t we?”
“Yes.” Wearing nothing but black dress pants, he leaned against the wall, arms folded, his eyes taking a leisurely tour of her body. “You do not ask the obvious question, Elena. You did not ask after Lijuan’s previous visit, either.”
She’d shrugged off her robe in preparation for putting on the dress—in a brilliant shade of blue, of course—and was wearing only a pair of gossamer panties in mint green, a small white silk flower sitting below one hip. It was clear what her archangel thought of her current state of undress. “I think,” she murmured, “you need to turn up the air-conditioning.”
A slow smile laced with pure seduction. “Come here, Hunter.”
Shaking her head, she picked up the dress and stepped into it. Unlike the gown she’d worn for Lijuan’s ball, this one wasn’t ankle-length but came to a few inches above the knee, the material fitting snugly over her h*ps before flaring out in a playful skirt. The pretty halter neck not only provided adequate support for her br**sts—always a consideration for a hunter—but closed with a glittering crystal button.