Archangel's Heart(148)
Elena grinned at the idea of her grandfather being a smooth-talking charmer. “You two fit.” Just like she fit with Raphael, Janvier with Ashwini.
“Yes.” Looking back toward the Tower door, as if searching for him, Majda said, “It hurts him to talk about Marguerite, so I will tell you what you should know before he arrives.”
“You don’t have to—”
“It is part of your history, azeeztee—”
Elena didn’t hear the rest through the slam of emotion, her heart a tornado in her chest. “No one has called me that for two decades.”
“She remembered?” A rasping whisper. “My precious baby remembered?”
Elena nodded. “Her mother’s kisses, the way you had such a soft voice when speaking to her, the words you used most often.”
Tears glittered in Majda’s eyes. “She didn’t believe herself abandoned?”
“No.” Elena frowned. “She grew up believing you died in a bus accident where your body was washed away.”
“Sister Constance.” A shaken whisper. “She did what I asked, must’ve used the bus crash when it happened at the right time.” Sobs broke her words into pieces.
Elena didn’t hesitate. She leaned in and took the woman who was her grandmother into her arms. And thought—she’s so small. Like her own mother had been. It was Jeffrey who’d given Elena her height. Wrapping her wings around Majda to shield her from prying eyes, she held her grandmother as Majda sobbed for her lost child who had grown up knowing she had been deeply loved by her mother.
“Gian left me alone for a year,” Majda whispered some time later, her sobs having left a rasp in her throat and her arms still around Elena. “I thought he’d moved on, but he hadn’t. And when I became with child, he was enraged, though I didn’t discover that until he had me captive. He beat one of the other Luminata so badly that it took him months to recover.”
“Hell.” All those angels were over a thousand years old, with the attendant healing powers, which meant Gian had turned someone into mincemeat. As he’d nearly done to Ibrahim. The angel remained in anshara under Laric’s watchful eye, the healer having chosen to stay in Lumia until Ibrahim was healed. He had the Cadre’s permission to continue on at Lumia afterward, but he’d decided to head for the Refuge and the Medica, where Keir had already offered him a position.
“I will be brave,” he’d told them using the silent tongue. “I will try. I do not want to become like the Luminata, so closed within myself that I cease to see the value of others.”
Elena intended to get in touch with Jessamy, give the other woman a heads-up that Laric might need a little of her gentle kindness and guidance. But today, her attention was on the woman who’d survived interminable horror.
“Gian didn’t come near me while I was pregnant,” her grandmother told her. “He was repulsed by the fact I carried Jean-Baptiste’s child. But two weeks after our baby was born, before we had settled our argument over her name—Jean-Baptiste wanted to call her Marguerite, while I preferred Taliyah—my husband disappeared.”
Majda pulled away, her face marked by tears but her eyes clear. “I searched for him, we all did, never thinking the angels would go so far as to hurt a vampire aligned to the Archangel Favashi—until Gian came to my parents’ home and made me an offer: that he would take care of me like a princess if I would be his mistress. I just had to leave my daughter behind.”
Hands fisting, she gritted out the next words. “He made it a point to say that my husband was no longer a problem. That was when I knew Gian had taken him. At the time, I believed Jean-Baptiste dead. And I knew my baby was another problem Gian would either eventually eliminate . . . or he’d abuse that babe. Simply because she was my husband’s child.”
Majda’s gaze was no longer broken; it held only fury. “Gian, he taunted us that he would have you. He called you my daughter.”
“The asshole isn’t taunting anyone now.”
A hard nod from her grandmother, this soft woman who nonetheless had a core of steel. “No, but back then, he held all the power.”
“So you ran.” Elena couldn’t imagine her fear and pain.
“I wasn’t yet fully recovered from the birth, but my parents urged me to go, gave me every last cent they had, did all they could to conceal my departure to give me time to get away.” Her body shook. “Gian told me later that he’d beaten them both when they wouldn’t tell him where I’d gone, left them so severely injured that they would’ve died if not for neighbors who nursed them back to health. He said it was a sign of his devotion.”