Elena’s grandmother looked like she wanted to spit. “I learned how to look after my beautiful Marguerite without my own mother nearby and my heart’s love presumed dead, managed to make a life for me and my baby in Paris, thought we were safe as she grew into a toddler who spoke so sweetly to me . . . then I saw an angel watching me one day.”
A chill of remembered fear drew the blood away from her face. “I thought I was being foolish, but still, in the depths of the night, I carried Marguerite out of our apartment and I hid in a place where I could watch that apartment. I told Marguerite it was a game.”
She smiled. “My baby was so good, played with her toys and never complained even when I realized I’d forgotten to pack her favorite snack. Even when I told her we couldn’t go back to our apartment because a bad angel was watching it. Instead, I took my child into a church where I knew the nun was kind.”
She rubbed a fist over her heart. “I kissed my azeeztee good-bye, and then I ran, my intent to lead the hunters as far from Marguerite as possible. They caught up to me in Turkey.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Majda breathed in and out in a fast rhythm. “I escaped once from Lumia. That was when Gian chained me up underground. It was a horror to see Jean-Baptiste, see how Gian had been taking his jealous rage out on my husband, but seeing that he was alive, it also kept me strong.”
“Why is Jean-Baptiste still alive?”
“At first, it was so Gian could brutalize him for his own gratification. Later, it was because Gian wanted us to suffer—I by watching my husband being hurt, Jean-Baptiste by having to watch Gian . . .”
Anger scalded Elena’s veins at the words her grandmother didn’t say, the atrocities she didn’t enumerate. “You don’t have to tell me. I can guess.”
“When I thought I’d break,” her grandmother said instead, “I’d speak to my husband, and no matter how emaciated he became, or how much pain he was in, he’d tell me to think of our daughter growing in freedom, in the light. We knew Gian hadn’t found her—he would’ve never been able to keep that to himself. “
A soft hand cupping Elena’s cheek. “Now we will think of you. Daughter of our daughter.”
“My mother loved to dance,” Elena found herself saying just as Jean-Baptiste stepped out of the Tower doors, his hair shining golden. “When I was little, sometimes we’d dance in the rain and play in water pools.” It caused her pain to talk about Marguerite, but it was worth it to see the hungry joy in Majda’s eyes.
She continued to speak after they got into the SUV.
Her grandparents soaked up her stories, laughed and cried, asked her more and more questions about her mother. Elena answered everything, found herself smiling more than once as she talked about events she’d almost forgotten—like the time she’d found her mother and Beth giggling together as Beth “helped” her bake a cake. “Except most of the mix was on Beth’s face,” she said with a laugh.
“I would like to meet our other granddaughter,” Jean-Baptiste said. “I think we are ready.”
“That’s where we’re going.” Ten minutes later, she nodded to the right. “This is her house.” It was a home into which Beth had moved without telling Elena until it was done.
“It has big enough doors for you,” her sister had said when she finally sent Elena a message asking her to come over. “Harrison picked our other house, and he wouldn’t let me renovate. So I moved.”
Elena’s heart had all but exploded—she’d never expected such stubborn determination from her baby sister. Neither had Harrison. But the vampire had caved and the entire family now lived in the dual-level Lenox Hill home Beth had chosen.
Elena had offered to give Beth any money she needed to clear what she’d assumed was a large mortgage, given the location of the house. She’d already set up a regular transfer to Beth’s account so that her sister didn’t have to rely financially on her husband. The only reason she hadn’t given Beth a big chunk at once was because she knew that while Bethie was a great mom, she wasn’t too good with money.
But her sister had shaken her head. “Daddy paid,” she’d said, her turquoise eyes dark as they looked into Elena’s. “He’s not so bad, Ellie. He loves you, too. I told him why I wanted to move and he didn’t argue, just wrote the check.”
That Elena and Jeffrey had a complicated relationship was an understatement.
“Beth is strong,” Elena told her grandparents. “Stronger than I knew for a long time, but she’s also the baby of our family.” Not Jeffrey’s new family, but their original unit of six.