Page 75 of It's You
Then again, phone calls with Lela were rarely peaches and cream. He didn’t blame her. Being raised by the woman who murdered your mother couldn’t help but make you a little mean.
Jack vividly remembered the night that his father had returned with baby Lela. It felt like he’d been gone for ten years, even though it had only been one, because it had been such a terrible time. A year of watching his mother leave early for work and come home late. A year of hearing her weep and howl in her room, in agony to be parted from Dubois, humiliated by his cheating. Not that Jack’s father had ever been a model husband. He was lazy and lacked imagination and initiative, but he was sweet and handsome, and whoever he was to anyone else, he belonged to Tallis.
Jack’s mother was always the stronger one, and as she had risen in the pack, Dubois had become resentful of her, feeling emasculated even as she insisted that something good in herlife meant something good for both of them. Finally, the night that Tallis was elected to the council, Dubois got drunk and slipped away with a young outcast, a half-Roug, half-Métis loner named Lynette. At twenty-two, Lynette still hadn’t been bound, and she was known for offering her favors willingly to anyone who caught her eye, bound or unbound. Dubois was humiliated by Tallis’s popularity and success, and although he couldn’t have found much actual physical pleasure in his dalliance with Lynette, he had been able to father her only child, Lela.
Upon discovering that Lynette was pregnant, Dubois and Lynette ran north with the intent to start over. But without the benefit of the pack around them, with its strength and protection, it was hard to find work, and with a few sloppy kills, it was easy for rogue Rougs to become the hunted rather than the hunter.
They eked out a miserable life before finally deciding to return to Portes de l’Enfer and throw themselves on Tallis’s mercy. Since Dubois broke the binding, it would be up to Tallis to accept him back into her home and bed…or not. The fate of Lynette and the baby would be decided by the council on which Tallis sat.
It wasn’t a good plan. They should have just stayed away.
Little Julien had nudgedhis older brother, Jacques, awake.
“I’m scared.Réveille-toi!”Wake up!
Jacques pushed his brother away, but the sound of loud voices in the small, adjacent living room made him sit up, rubbing his eyes.
The bathroom door between the bedrooms opened, and Jemma and Jeanette entered their brothers’ bedroom, looking to Jacques for comfort, awakened, like Julien, by the sound of fighting.
“I think Papa’s back.” Jemma sighed, biting her lower lip. “I swear I heard his voice.”
“I think I heard a baby cry,” whispered Jeanette, brown eyes big and frightened, bunching the sides of her nightgown in fists.
Jacques put his hands up to silence his younger siblings, pressing his ear against the bedroom door to listen to what the adults were saying.
“Tu…tu viens ici avec ta pute et ton bâtard et tu penses que je vais te souhaiter la bienvenue? Es-tu fou? Es-tu fou, Dubois?” Tallis spoke in a shrill, high-pitched voice.
You come here with your whore and your bastard and expect me to welcome you? Are you crazy? Are you crazy, Dubois?
Jacques looked at Jeanette’s face, at her eyes closed and clenched shut against the shame of the words. Jemma began to cry softly, and little Julien put his chubby toddler arms around her.
“Sors avant que je te tue!”
Get out before I kill you.
“Écoute-moi, Tallis…” His father began in a soft, cajoling voice, and Jacques’s heart clutched to hear his father say his mother’s name,Tah-lee, so tenderly, beseeching her to listen.
Jacques gestured again to his siblings to stay quiet and slowly cracked open the door. The light was dim in the simple, rustic living room. The desk lamp where his mother had been paying bills was on, but the fire was petering out. His mother stood in the center of the room with her hands on her hips, her black hair falling down her back in curls and tangles, her chin held high.Jacques’s fifteen-year-old heart swelled with pride. She looked like a warrior.
He turned his glance to the door. A young woman in a simple dress and shawl stood against the door, holding a bundle in her arms, her eyes down. He recognized her as Lynette Reynard. Reynard. The fox. The surname the Roux-ga-roux gave to half-breed skinwalkers. To be a Reynard was a mark of shame. It would be especially embarrassing to his mother that his father had cheated on her with a Reynard.
Jacques looked more closely at Lynette, even feeling a little sorry for her, until he looked closer and perceived a smile on her lips. His brows furrowed. She was smirking with her little beady fox eyes narrowed. Why was she smirking?
His father stood in front of the girl, looking much older and bigger than she, his once jet-black hair peppered with gray, wild and long. His face was a mixture of emotions, from angry to remorseful to…Jacques sucked in a surprised breath. Oh my god.Love.He saw love on his father’s face as Dubois gazed at Tallis, and it softened the anger and the remorse. Despite everything, his father still loved his mother.
Jacques looked back to his mother’s face to search it more carefully. Fury, check. Disgust, check. But there. There, on her mouth, he saw it in the way her lips didn’t tighten into a thin, white line. They stayed soft and open, in spite of her words, and Jacques thought to himself, his heart skipping hopefully,She still loves him too.
A snarky giggle distracted Jacques from their intercourse. He looked at the girl. She placed the bundle gently on the chair beside the door and pushed Dubois out of her way, stepping forward, toe-to-toe with Jacques’s mother with her hands on her hips.
“The great Tallis, who couldn’t hold on to her man! So busy with your council meetings, he came to me. And he liked whathe found between my legs.” Lynette cupped the part of her body she was talking about, and Jacques felt his cheeks flush hot as he watched her.
His mother’s eyes brightened to a burn, then narrowed, and Jacques swallowed nervously, recognizing her expression. This girl was making Tallis very angry.
“I don’t blame him. You think he wants your smelly old dried-up prune cunt? What man would want that, when he can have this?”
Jacques’s mother looked up and down the girl’s body slowly, her nostrils flaring with fury, her lips a thin, white slash. Suddenly, her eyes flicked to Dubois, and Jacques knew that they were eyespeaking. He could see it between them, heavy and serious.
Finally, Dubois stepped forward and put his hand on Lynette’s arm, holding Tallis’s eyes with his. “That’s enough, Lynn. We’re leaving.Maintenant. Now.”
