Page 12 of Archangel’s Lineage

She talked to him until the connection began to stutter. And as much as she wanted him with her, she didn’t ask him to come to New York. Because he was an archangel and that meant a duty heavy and demanding. The reason he was on this journey was because another archangel had put his personal needs before that duty—she would never put Raphael in the position to make a choice between it and her.

Whichever decision he made, it would hurt him.

“Elena.” A wrench in his voice as they got ready to say goodbye.

“You need to go, find out about Qin.” She made her voice strong even if it rasped. “I know you’ll be with me as soon as you can. Love you, Archangel.”

The connection failed before he could respond. But it was all right. She knew she was loved—loved in a way she’d never experienced before she stepped onto a Tower roof with her stomach clenched against a fear bone-chilling... and walked into her destiny.

The susurration of wings, the kiss of a power that was the turbulent ocean in her mind, the way he laughed until those eyes of impossible blue glowed, it was home to her now.

Today, she clutched that feeling close, and tried to pretend she was falling asleep on Raphael’s chest, his wings wrapped around her. But her mind couldn’t stop going in circles, couldn’t stop imagining a homecoming where she stepped off the plane to the news that Jeffrey was dead.

The hours passed with excruciating slowness amid mere snatches of sleep, and her eyes were gritty and dry by the time she walked into the hospital in the very early morning hours, the world outside pitch black. Crossed time zones on top of her lack of sleep after the disaster meant she’d been going for far too long—but adrenaline powered by fear continued to pump through her system.

She saw Gwendolyn first.

The other woman was just walking out of an ICU room, her face worn and her rich black hair pulled haphazardly off her face into a bun at her nape. But even now, with her shoulders bowed and the fine bones of her face stark against the cream of her skin, there remained an ineffable elegance to Gwendolyn Deveraux, a sense of grace that went beyond flesh and bone.

“Gwendolyn.”

Glancing up, Gwendolyn stared for a minute before she jolted forward into Elena’s arms. Jeffrey’s second wife had never before made such intimate contact with Elena, but Elena wrapped her arms around Gwendolyn without hesitation, held her as she sobbed. Gwendolyn had always been slender, but today she felt fragile, a bird with bones delicate.

“Shh,” Elena murmured as she rocked the other woman, her chest tight with tears she couldn’t shed and her muscles locked into knots. “It’s okay. I’m here now. We’ll handle this.”

8

Drawing back on a gulping sob several minutes later, Gwendolyn wiped at her tears with the tissues she’d stuffed into the pockets of her navy blue dress with a wide skirt and fitted bodice. It was belted in the middle with a fabric belt, the waist-length cardigan Gwendolyn wore over it a crisp white.

Elena didn’t take anything from Gwendolyn’s smart clothing except that this was her normal. As Elena’s knives were hers. She had at least ten on her even though she knew that was overkill for a hospital in her own city. The comfort of the familiar to fight back the panic—Gwendolyn wore her clothing with the same too-precise attention to detail.

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.

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