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Sir Osvaldo and I lock eyes. Of all three Elders, he’s the one Sade and I have been seeing most of these past few years because he gave us a few highly secret assignments that not even Romano was supposed to get wind of.
“Duke Royales,” Sir Osvaldo greets me, before turning his cunning eyes to Eva. “Ms. Brannan. Please, join us.” He motions with his cane toward the table.
Eva’s hand is cold and clammy in mine, her eyes large and unmoving. She must be reliving scenes of that horrible night, when she first laid eyes on both these Elders. She was supposed to kill them that night. Giuliano Serratti, the third Elder, only shows himself in person on the rarest occasions, and I’m glad he’s not here now. His presence would have seriously complicated things.
Winding an arm reassuringly around Eva, I coax the first few steps out of her. But as we get closer to the table, a door opens out of a nook in the wall next to the large bookcase, and Sade walks out, his arm wrapped around a feeble woman.
I stop in my tracks. I don’t even need to get a good look at her to know who it is.
Mother.
When she raises her thin face, it knocks the breath out of me. She looks young, too young, as if her trauma froze her in time, in the moment it happened. She’s been gone for most of my life, but here she is now, an elegant hairdo on top of her head, her delicate body wrapped in a pale-pink two piece.
Her whole face lights up, and I know she recognizes me. She starts trembling and making strange sounds, her eyes turning watery. This can’t be right. This reaction can’t be doing her any good.
“Sade.” The low warning is enough for my brother to understand what I mean. He pulls Mother tighter into his side. Her slim fingers claw on to him for the life of her, yet her eyes still hang on mine. She tries to form words, but every attempt is disturbing, as if she hasn’t spoken in decades, and she’s forgotten how it works.
“I know it’s not a good time, and that you weren’t ready for this,” Sir Osvaldo says in his ever-present calm. “But she insisted on seeing you.”
“I wouldn’t have let this happen under any other circumstances,” Sade puts in. “But it’s like she sensed you were close. She became restless, and kept trying to say your name.”
“She needs medication,” Eva chimes in, her voice so soft it acts like a painkiller. I find myself pulling her closer into me. “She’s been through hell, not to mention that, when she last saw Micah, he was a baby. Now he’s a man. Her motherly instincts activated, and she knew that he was close, but the pressure is too much. She’ll break.”
“Ms. Brannan is right, Sade,” Lady Ophelia says, drawing all of our attention to her. She is usually quiet, but she’s a deadly presence, and we’re always aware of her like of a snake ready to bite. She walks over to Sade and Mother, her long black dress trailing after her. If this woman were a character in a movie, she’d make a perfect Lady Death with her perfectly white chignon and timeless face.
“I know you want to gently ease her off the medication Romano forced on her all these years, but gently is the keyword here,” she continues in a melodious voice that we all know could snap like a whip at any moment. “Take her back to her room, and give her the tincture Dr. Law prescribed.”
Sade speaks hushedly in Mother’s ear, but she claws harder to him, her sounds more erratic, and he ends up staring at me with the closest thing I’ve seen to desperation on his face.
“Maybe if you let her touch you, just once,” Eva muses, pressing her body into my side. “Come on, let’s do it together,” she says, taking the first step. “I’ll be right here with you.”
Slowly, we approach the woman who birthed me in the aftermath of major trauma. If anything, this woman should hate me. She should recoil from me, scream and kick and scratch, but no. She reaches up and cups my cheek with the gentleness of a feather, her features distorting in a gut-wrenching expression. She opens her mouth, her bloodless lips trembling as tears streak her face and fall into her mouth. Her lips come together in repeated attempts to form a word, which she fails to do a number of times. But she doesn’t give up and, finally, my name comes out in a strangled voice.
“Mi-cah.”
The ground rushes from under me, and my knees hit the floor. Burying my face in her pale pink wool skirt, I breathe in the scent of my mother, my ribcage crumbling along with the walls around my heart. Her arms lock around my head as she keeps saying my name, and I squeeze her tighter until Eva’s light hand on my shoulder makes me aware it’s too much. I could break her.
“The Elders are beginning to look impatient,” she whispers in my ear.
Sade manages to pry our mother off of me, and I come back up to my feet, making eye contact with her.
“Soon,” I tell her. “Mom.”
The bright smile on her face is the last thing I see before the door closes.
“I know, it was an unpleasant interruption,” Sir Osvaldo says, streaking a hand through his long white beard like he couldn’t be less impressed. “But it was necessary. When she wouldn’t stop trying to say your name, Dr. Law suggested that we let her see you. He said it would be crucial to her healing, and we know how much you and your brother want her to heal.”
What the arrogant old prick doesn’t know is that, by interrupting this meeting, Sade conveyed more information than words ever could. The main piece of it being that he’ll support me in any decision I’ll make today regarding the Elders. He knows I won’t leave here without their permission to marry Eva, or without their lives, no matter what heat that will bring to bear on us. I don’t give a fuck, let the other Elders hear what happens when their entitled elite dare stand between us and what’s ours—because Sade knows I would have done the same for him and Justine.
Lady Ophelia takes a seat at the round table, arranging her black dress around her knees, while Sir Osvaldo goes to stand behind her like the judge and lord of this mansion. They’re not married, but they’ve been working together since the beginning of fucking time. From what I’ve seen of Lady Ophelia, she has nothing but disdain for the institution of marriage anyway. The woman likes power, money, and much younger men.
“We suppose you already know why you’ve been summoned, considering you took it upon yourself to bring Ms. Brannan with you,” Sir Osvaldo says, his wicked little eyes resting on my future wife. If I didn’t know his cock became as useless as his cane in the Korean war, I’d fucking gut him on the spot. “So we’re going to make this short and to the point. You will separate, effective immediately.”
At first, silence fills the space, and the first thing to fill it again is my laughter.
“Look at you, throwing around orders like you have a say in this.”
Lady Ophelia lifts an eyebrow, and even though Osvaldo’s face remains fixed, I recognize the flash of indignation in his eyes.
