Sobbing, Elena wiped the backs of her hands over her eyes, her chest hurting with the force of her childish sobs. “I miss Ari and Belle so much. I miss you. You left Beth and me all alone, too, and now there’s no one to teach Beth how to be a mom.”
“I know, oh, I know.” Walking around the counter, Marguerite took Elena’s tearstained face in her soft, flour-dusted hands. “But I have told you, Elena, you were always the strongest of my babies. Even my wild Belle, she had a heart that carried bruises always, but my Elena, my Elena is strong. Like my mama. Did you know her name was Elena?”
“Really?”
A smile that lit up her face to such beauty, she was the prettiest woman Elena had ever seen. “Yes, it was her, how you say?” One of those unexpected but familiar pauses in her otherwise fluent English. “Her home name. Only her best friends used it.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, you did. I told you stories about her during the time my little Beth used my womb as a football pitch.” Laughter that was melted honey against Elena’s skin, sweet and a little wild. “Tales of my strong mama to my strong baby.”
Elena jutted out her chin, her anger intermingled with a bleak happiness at being able to feel her mother’s touch again. “I thought you didn’t remember much about Grandmama.”
“I remember enough.” The scent of gardenias lush and fragrant in the air, her dark gold skin silken, her hands fine boned when Elena lifted her own to hold her mother’s to her cheeks.
“I left you the day that beast came into our house,” Marguerite whispered. “You know that.”
Elena thought of the bloody streaks on the carpet that told of her mother’s brutal fight to get to her daughters, the broken look in her eyes when she understood her two firstborn would be forever silent, and knew Marguerite told no lies. She’d died that day along with Ari and Belle, leaving behind an empty shell. “I still needed you,” Elena insisted, ignoring the truth because it hurt too much. “You would’ve been okay.”
“I wish that was so, azeeztee.” A word of gentle affection from a sun-drenched desert land Marguerite had never known. “I wasn’t strong, not like you, not like my mama.” Kissing Elena on both cheeks as she’d always done, her mother looked into her eyes. “Look after Beth. And look after my husband. A part of him died with me.”
Elena shook her head, gripping her mother’s wrists in a futile effort to hold her to the world. “He hates me.”
“No, Elena. He loves you too much.”
• • •
Elena woke with the echo of her mother’s words in her mind and the delicate notes of Marguerite’s favorite perfume in the air. Unwilling to lose the fragile link to the woman who had borne her, she lay prone on the bed, her wings painted by the early afternoon sunlight slanting in from the balcony and the idea of her father loving her as strange a thing as the Hudson turning to blood.
Oh, Jeffrey had once loved her as he’d loved all his daughters. She remembered the way he’d held her hand in the warm strength of his as he took her to see the bodies of her dead sisters, fighting against other family members in order to give Elena what she needed, the peace of knowing Ari and Belle were safe, that the monster hadn’t made them like him.
Jeffrey’s eyes had been wet when she looked up from saying good-bye, his strong face struggling against what she now knew must’ve been unbearable grief. It couldn’t have been easy for him to face the broken bodies of his two eldest girls, but he’d done it for a daughter who lived, paying the painful price and never making Elena feel wrong for her need.
“Don’t cry,” Elena had said, wiping away his tears when he bent down. “They’re not hurting anymore.”
That “Papa,” strong and loving and kind, had been lost to her long ago.
Touching her hands to her face, she imagined she could feel the imprint of her mother’s gentle kisses, a bittersweet ache inside. “I love you, Mama,” she whispered, and it was as true as her anger at the choice Marguerite had ultimately made.
It was hard to leave the moment and the final vestiges of memory, but a glance at the clock told her it was already past two. Staring into the mirror in the bathroom, she tried to see the shadow of her mother’s fingers, but the imprint was gone, faded into time. It hurt. Breath jagged, she washed off the tears she’d cried in sleep, dried off, then forced herself to keep her word to Montgomery.
The food choked down, she was strapping on her crossbow when her phone rang with a boy band ringtone her younger half sister had programmed in for herself. “Eve? I was just coming to see you.”
“It’s Amy,” was the surprising answer.
Elena’s fingers froze on the strap she’d been about to tug into place. Gwendolyn’s older daughter didn’t speak to Elena, likely out of loyalty to her mother—unlike Eve, Amy was old enough to understand that there was something wrong in her parents’ relationship, that her father didn’t love her mother as he should.
And yet, Amy loved her father, which left her with no one to blame. Elena didn’t mind giving the teenager a focus for her anger, not when she understood what it was to be that girl, confused and angry and sad at the same time. “What is it?” She knew it had to be bad for Amy to break her silence. “Has something happened to Eve?”
“We had a half day at school so we came home at lunch. After we ate, Father locked Eve in her room.” A rush of words, as if Amy had been holding them inside too long. “He says he’s shipping her off to boarding school in Europe in a few hours.”