Lover Avenged(115)

“Why didn’t you just bring him in?” Havers said. “I would have seen Rehvenge again immediately.”

The moment that followed was like something in a TV soap, where the camera zoomed in on the face of a character: Ehlena felt as though everything pulled away from her, the office retreating into the far distance as she was abruptly spotlit and under microscopic scrutiny.

Questions rolled into her brain. Did she really think she was going to get away with what she’d done? She’d even known about the security cameras…and yet she hadn’t thought about that when she’d gone behind the pharmacist’s counter the night before.

Everything was going to change as the result of this. Her life, once a struggle, was going to become insupportable.

Destiny? No…stupidity.

How the hell could she have done this?

“I’ll resign,” she said roughly. “Effective tonight. I should never have done it… I was worried about him, overwrought about Stephan, and I made a horrible judgment call. I’m deeply sorry.”

Neither Havers nor Catya said a thing, but they didn’t have to. It was all about trust, and she had violated theirs. As well as a shitload of patient safety regulations.

“I’ll clean out my locker. And leave immediately.”





THIRTY-THREE




Rehvenge didn’t get out to see his mother enough.

That was the thought that occurred to him as he pulled in front of the safe house he’d moved her into nearly a year ago. After the family mansion in Caldwell had been compromised by lessers, he’d gotten everyone out of that house and installed them at this Tudor mansion well south of town.

It had been the only thing good that had come of his sister’s abduction-well, that and the fact that Bella had found herself a male of worth in the Brother who’d rescued her. The thing was, with Rehv having taken his mother from the city when he had, she and her beloved doggen had escaped what the Lessening Society had done to the aristocracy over the summer.

Rehv parked the Bentley in front of the mansion, and before he got out of the car, the door to the house opened and his mother’s doggen stood in the light, huddled against the cold.

Rehv’s wingtips had slick soles, so he was very careful as he came around on the dusting of snow. “Is she okay?”

The doggen stared up at him, her eyes misting with tears. “It’s getting close to the time.”

Rehv came inside, closed the door, and refused to hear that. “Not possible.”

“I’m very sorry, sire.” The doggen took out a white handkerchief from the pocket of her gray uniform. “Very…sorry.”

“She’s not old enough.”

“Her life has been far longer than her years.”

The doggen knew well what had gone on in the house during the time Bella’s father had been with them. She had cleaned up broken glass and shattered china. Had bandaged and nursed.

“Verily, I can’t bear for her to go,” the maid said. “I shall be lost without my mistress.”

Rehv put a numb hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently. “You don’t know for sure. She hasn’t been to see Havers. Let me go be with her, okay?”

When the doggen nodded, Rehv slowly took the stairs up to the second floor, passing family portraits in oil that he had moved from the old house.

At the top of the landing, he went down to the left and knocked on a set of doors. “Mahmen?”

“In here, my son.”

The response in the Old Language came from behind another door, and he backtracked and went into her dressing room, the familiar scent of Chanel No. 5 calming him.

“Where are you?” he said to the yards and yards of hanging clothes.

“I am in the back, my dearest son.”

As Rehv walked down the rows of blouses and skirts and dresses and ball gowns, he breathed deeply. His mother’s signature perfume was on all of the garments, which were hung by color and type, and the bottle it came from was on the ornate dressing table, among her makeup and lotions and powders.

He found her in front of the three-way full-length mirror. Ironing.

Which was beyond odd and made him take stock of her.

His mother was regal even in her rose-colored dressing gown, her white hair up on her perfectly proportioned head, her posture exquisite as she sat on a high stool, her massive pear-shaped diamond flashing on her hand. The ironing board she sat behind had a woven basket and a can of spray starch on one end and a pile of pressed handkerchiefs on the other. As he watched her, she was in midkerchief, the pale yellow square she was working on halved, the iron she wielded hissing as she swept it up and down.

“Mahmen, what are you doing?” Okay, obvious on one level, but his mother was the chatelaine. He couldn’t remember ever seeing her do housework or laundry or anything of the sort. One had doggen for those things.