Page 13 of Archangel’s Lineage

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.”

Elena nodded because she couldn’t bear to hurt this woman who’d done nothing but fall in love with a man whose heart had been given to another a long time ago, then smashed into so many pieces that what he had to offer Gwendolyn was a cobbled-together imitation of the real thing.

The worst of it was that Gwendolyn knew. She was too smart not to know. But love, Elena understood, wasn’t always sensible. She, after all, had fallen in love with an archangel who’d made her close her own hand over the blade of a knife, her blood a scarlet warning.

“Is someone at home?” she asked Gwendolyn. “You won’t be alone?”

“All the girls,” Gwendolyn reassured her. “Harrison and Maynard are looking after the kids and the Guild’s given Eve compassionate leave.”

Harrison was Beth’s husband, Maynard Amy’s. “Good.”

“You won’t leave him?” Gwendolyn twisted toward the ICU room, the shadows under her eyes purplish bruises.

“I promise.”

After finally convincing the other woman to return home and get some sleep, Elena took a deep breath. It didn’t calm her. If anything, the medicinal air, sharp and acrid, just made things worse, tightening the knots in her gut until they threatened to strangle her.

“Ellie?” A hesitant question.

Careful to keep her wings flush to her back, Elena turned to find herself facing a small woman with skin of pale brown and eyes of tawny hazel in a rounded face, her curly black hair cut in a neat bob that she’d pinned to the sides. She wore dark blue scrubs, had a stethoscope around her neck.

Elena frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, her brain stuttering on the knowledge that she knew this young doctor but coming up blank on the name. “I feel like I should recognize you, but—”

“Oh, don’t worry.” The woman waved a hand, her nervous expression easing into one so warm that it lit up the bleak chill that was the ICU. “The last time you saw me, I was maybe fifteen, had the worst case of acne, and was padded all over with what Mom called my cuddle layer. Med school took care of that—I barely have time to sleep, much less eat.”

A neuron fired. “Lola?” Elena’s mouth fell open. “You’re a doctor now?” Last she remembered, her friend Hector Santiago’s daughter had been a shy schoolgirl who barely said a word.

A dimpled smile. “Resident anyway.”

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