27
Elena couldn’t pretend every hair on her body wasn’t standing up on end by the time Raphael finished, but she had other priorities right now. “You broke her hold,” she said, knowing he needed to hear it said aloud. “She couldn’t keep you in that dream or vision or whatever it was.”
Midnight shadows crossed his face. “It was difficult—perhaps would’ve been impossible if I hadn’t had you to draw me back. She is my mother, and as such, has known me since I was born. She understands how to circumvent my every shield.”
“Maybe she did once,” Elena rose to her knees, shoving her hair impatiently off her face, “but she’s been asleep for over a thousand years. She might’ve known the boy you were, but she doesn’t know the man you’ve become. And she has no concept of the bonds that tie us together.”
Raphael’s expression shifted again, and she knew he was calculating matters with that inhuman logic he sometimes displayed. “Yes,” he said at last. “That may be her only weakness.”
Elena had to fight her instinctive negative response to his expression, his words. He’d never be human and to expect it of him was to lie to herself. “Do you need to know her weakness?” she asked.
“She threatened you, Elena.”
He didn’t have to say anything else. She knew very well what Raphael would do to protect her—and if her hunter instincts scowled at the idea of being protected, the heart of her understood that to love this male was to accept his need to hold her safe.
“A lot of women have trouble with their mothers-in-law.”
Raphael’s look was priceless. “My mother is an insane archangel.”
She almost laughed—or perhaps that was hysteria rising to the surface. “She was. Maybe these bursts of violence were a result of her being in a half-dream state. It may still be that Sleep has cured her—from what you’ve told me, she acted normal in the dream, or as normal as someone of her power and age can be.”
You do not know how much I wish that to be true.
“I know it down to the last heartbreaking glimmer of hope,” she whispered, swallowing the knot of emotion in her throat. “Every day, I wish I could’ve somehow reached through my own mother’s sorrow and convinced her that life was worth living. Every day.”
Raphael tugged her down into his arms. “You speak rarely of those events, and yet you call out to her in your nightmares.”
In the kitchen, Elena thought, they were always in the kitchen in the dreams. She was fooled into hope every single time—and then the blood would begin to seep down the walls, across the floor. Her mother always remained trapped in the room, no matter how much Elena begged her to run.
“I found her,” she said, speaking of a nightmare that continued to leave her trembling in panic in the coldest depths of the night. “I got home from school, and I walked inside the house.” That was when she’d seen it, that single high-heeled shoe lying on its side on the gleaming shine of the checkerboard tiles.
She should’ve walked back out that same instant, but she’d been happy. Mama hadn’t worn high heels for a long time—the child in her had thought that maybe it meant Marguerite was better now, that maybe she’d have her mother back. The illusion had lasted a few precious seconds.
“The shadow,” she said, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. “On the wall. I could see it swinging so gently. I didn’t want to look up, didn’t want to see.” Even now, terror pulsed in her blood. “I could feel my heart freeze into a small, hard ball, and then I looked up and it just . . . shattered.” Sharp, vicious shards, they had cut into her, made her bleed. “I kept looking up at her, at the way she ...” The words wouldn’t come, wouldn’t be formed. “The shadow,” she said instead, “it just kept swinging. The whole time my heart was bleeding out below her, the shadow just kept swinging.”
Raphael could feel his hunter breaking all over again in his arms, and it was unbearable. “Hers was a selfish act.”
“No, she—”
“She lost two daughters,” Raphael said. “She was tortured. But so were you. You saw your sisters murdered before your eyes, saw your mother suffer.”
“Not the same.”
“No. Because you were a child.” He crushed her to him, wishing he could turn back time, shake Marguerite Deveraux until she came out of the fog of her grief and saw the treasures she was about to throw away. “It is permissible to be angry with her, Elena. It does not make you disloyal.”
A ragged sob, so harsh that it sounded torn out of her, before a clenched fist pounded on his chest. “Why didn’t she love us as much as she loved Ari and Belle?” A child’s question. “Why did she leave us when she saw how Jeffrey was becoming? Why?” Wet against his chest, that fist halting as she whispered, “Why?”
Later, she asked him to spar with her, and he did, letting her work out her anguish, her pain, through hard physical combat. But she was distracted, not fighting at her best. Instead of letting up, he gave no quarter.
“If you won’t accept the protection I assign you,” he said when he put her on her back for the second time in as many minutes, “then you must be better than the best.”
A snarl that he far preferred over the haunted pain that had crumpled her spirit. “Beating me into the ground isn’t helping matters.” She flowed back to her feet.
He slammed at her again.