Page 47 of Crying Wolfe
As she spoke, sparks of intelligence and exultance danced in her blue eyes, every bit as brilliant as those stars she was so enamored with. Stars named for heroic characters, or tragic ones.
Sometimes both.
“One of these Nereids was the wife of Poseidon, the god of the sea. Upon hearing the boast, she and her sisters demanded the entire kingdom suffer for such disrespect. Benighted by Poseidon’s curse, the people demanded that the king and queen sacrifice Andromeda, who immediately acquiesced to save her people. They chained her to a rock, where she was forced to suffer before the elements, waiting for the sea monster, Cetus, to claim her.”
“Am I the sea monster in this story?” he asked. “Because this took a turn I wasn’t expecting.”
“No,” she giggled. “I was getting to that. Perseus was the son of the god Zeus and a mortal woman. He’d spent his life at sea, performing superhuman feats, not the least of which was saving Andromeda from Cetus. He fell in love with her, then, and he claimed her as his bride.”
“Well, that’s better, then.” He settled back, his fingers toying in her hair. “I still feel a tragedy coming. How did she end up in the stars? Some shitty twist of fate, I reckon.”
Shaking her head, she splayed a hand over his ribs, settling her fingers in the grooves between. “In her constellation, she’s depicted in the chains she wore when sacrificed because the goddess Athena was supposedly moved by her willingness to die for her people…butIlike to remember Andromeda more than her chains, but as she was after. The first queen of Mycenae. A woman who was loved and revered by her people, and her demigod husband all her life. A mother to nine children.Nine. Can you imagine?”
“I’d rather not,” Eli chuckled, though he sobered when she lifted off of his chest, and sat back with her legs crossed to look at him with eyes as solemn as he’d ever seen them.
“Do you want children?” she asked.
“Doesn’t really matter at this point,” he said carefully, not wanting to examine the familiar pain lancing through him. “We’ve not been doing anything to prevent them.”
Her hand flew to her womb, her features pensive. Perhaps troubled. “I suppose we should have discussed…”
“Doyouwant kids?” he countered.
She nodded, searching his features for something he didn’t know how to give. “My parents were not what I’d call…happy. And, in the end, Emmett, Emmaline, and I were more of a secret burden to my father than a boon. He married my mother for love, but they were both destitute, so he stashed my mother away and married an heiress with a heart condition who wasn’t expected to live a long life. Except she did, bearing him four more children. He ended up choosing his second wife over his first and kept us in a house in the country. We rarely saw him, and when we did, he wasn’t kind. My mother withered without him, into a bitter old woman, with ironically poor health.”
Plucking at an errant thread on the cuff of his shirt, she continued. “All my life, my siblings have been such a comfort to me, and finding the rest of my family has been wondrous. I’ve often dreamed of having children so I might lavish upon them the care and concern my parents never showed us. I plan to raise them to feel loved and wanted, because they would be. I’d like them to have siblings just as dear as mine, and more cousins than they can count to go on adventures with.”
Eli knew her lovely fantasy to be just that. A fiction. A hope born of her youth and her loneliness that had the capacity to be crushed with the cruelties of fate.
“Rosaline,” he started, taking her hands in his. “I lied to you.”
She said nothing, gathering herself as if preparing for a terrible confession.
Maybe it was the stars. Perseus and Andromeda. Or the reality that he might have already planted a child inside of her. Something his soul yearned to do…
And yet.
“I told you I had no family,” he began, a familiar pain blooming in his chest, guilt winching his ribs tight so his lungs couldn’t fully inflate.
“You did. That your father and mother were both taken from you by the time you were ten.”
“And they were…but what I didn’t mention was that I had a younger brother at the time. Caleb.”
Rather than berate him for the lie, her fingers curled around his. “Had?” She echoed the salient word with fathomless sympathy. “Past tense?”
Not far enough in the past, apparently. Not so long ago that he didn’t still wear the pain on his skin. “When I was ten, he was just six. We were taken in by a mining family for a couple of years, and I promised to work so that I could send Caleb to school. He was born early and grew up on the scrawny side.” Eli caressed his wife’s knuckles, and turned her hands over to stroke at the smooth palms. His brother had soft hands…he’d been sensitive and anxious. Eli would have fought the entire world to protect him.
“Caleb had a head for books, so I kept working and he kept learning. When Morley invested in my mine a decade ago, I took some of that money and sent Caleb to college. He got a degree in mathematics. Learned all about accounting, finance, business, and trade. I’d struck gold by the time he graduated and made him my partner immediately. We’d this friend in Nevada, Beau, and he was our third musketeer. I made him foreman of many of my mines, and he became a very wealthy man in his own right.”
The serenity he found in his wife’s features blurred and disappeared as Eli stared into the past, plagued by every bitter emotion there was. “Beau and I always made a game of collecting things from digs and mines. Old things. Arrowheads, clay pottery, sometimes bones and fossils that had no business being in a desert. This game turned into a passion, and as men, we often financed archeological digs with preeminent universities, just to see what treasure was buried in the past.”
He broke off. Wishing like hell the story ended there. He’d never spoken the words. Never told anyone of his loss, of the circumstances surrounding it and the reasons he had for keeping himself so tenaciously isolated.
“Like the treasure being catalogued and appraised over there?” Rosaline pointed to the corner where half of what he called the Midas Tomb waited in an organized chaos for the professor and the appraiser to return in the morning.
“Exactly like that, in fact.” He sighed, scraping his hand over a stubbled jaw. “I’ve no idea who started calling me Midas, but Beau and Caleb thought it was hilarious that it caught on. In fact, they’d concocted a scheme to find the fabled Midas Tomb and hold the chalice his daughter drank from. The one that supposedly turned her to gold. The chalice was supposedly inlayed by a gem called the Anatolian Sapphire. Caleb found the sapphire through one of the digs in the Near East, and he paid a king’s ransom for it.”
“What happened?” she prompted, causing him to realize he’d fallen too quiet for too long.
