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I sighed into my hands. We were getting nowhere.
“Lizzy, just one more question and we’ll call it a night.” Luke placed his hand on my shoulder, drawing my attention away from the elders who were still standing around the table like they wanted to restart their argument. “Tell me. What was your mother’s name?”
It wasn’t easy to forget the name of the woman I’d killed in childbirth. Granny had named me after her. Maybe she thought it was a suitable punishment, to bear her name as a reminder of my curse.
“Elizabeth Quinn Redding,” I told him with a shrug. “Same as me.”
Esther gasped as Luke fell back in his seat, a glazed expression coming over his face. I looked back and forth between them, searching for some kind of explanation for their reaction.
“Elizabeth Quinn? Can it be?” Esther asked after a full minute of shocked silence. “Is it truly her?”
Luke shook his head back and forth. His mouth had fallen open.
“It has to be, dear sister.”
“You can’t seriously think…?” Ariana crossed her arms. “It’s just another trap, Luke.”
“You don’t understand.” He stood up and pushed his chair back. “My wife shared a secret with me before the demons took her. A secret that I only shared with one other person – my sister, Esther.”
I was getting the feeling everyone in the room knew something I didn’t. It was starting to frustrat
e me to be so out of the loop.
“What secret?”
Luke turned to me, his eyes full of profound sadness and longing.
“That she was with child."
"I'm sorry, but what does that have to do with me?"
Luke spread his fingers on the glossy surface of the table, and inhaled a large breath before answering.
"My wife's name was Elizabeth Quinn. When she was taken by the demons, I thought that our unborn child had died with her. If I’d known there was the tiniest chance she’d survived, I never would’ve stopped looking for you.”
“Wait, what?” I took a step back when he tried to touch my cheek. “What are you saying?”
“We know now why the partnership rite worked on you. Why you’re Nephilim. You are my daughter. You are my blood.”
The elders burst into argument again, but I didn’t pay them any attention. My mind was racing a hundred miles an hour. If I was getting this right, Luke was claiming to be my father. And if that was true, then this was where my mother had disappeared to before she gave birth to me. She’d left Hanna for a better life in Westward Manor. Why she ever left, was beyond me.
I’d always longed for a father to come take me away from Hanna, and love me the way I imagined my mother would’ve loved me. But that had only been a fairy tale. A sweet dream to entertain my restless nights when Granny had been particularly harsh. And yet, he was real. Flesh and blood, standing in front of me. Three hundred and twenty years old. Which meant I would live a long life, too.
Luke and I stared at each other, the rest of the room falling away. I could see the same longing in his eyes, accompanied now by hope. My stomach clenched at the thought of Luke finding out I wasn't the perfect daughter he'd always wanted. Granny had always found fault in me. It wouldn't take him long to learn that I had a hard time following rules. I hoped he could be more forgiving than Granny.
All the while, a thought buzzed at the back of my mind like a horsefly refusing to go away. Something from the night of the ball. A small factoid that remained embedded in my conscious, but nagged me all the same. I concentrated on it for a moment and then gasped. Luke had told me that his spot on the board was supposed to be passed down to his children. If I was Luke’s daughter, that meant I was next in line for his position. Gabe would automatically lose his spot.
I looked up in time to see Gabe’s back as he flew out of the conference room, not bothering to say goodbye.
Chapter Nineteen
The knock on our bedroom door tore me from a fitful sleep. From the way Raquel snored with her mouth wide open, she wouldn’t be answering it. I threw the sheets off and pulled a light sweater over my pajamas.
Last night had left me with a throbbing headache. After the meeting with the board ended, Luke had walked me back to my room and broken the news to Raquel. She’d been ecstatic to learn we were cousins, and would’ve woken everyone up in the manor to tell them, if Luke had let her. The news hadn’t really sunk in with me yet.
Now that I knew he was my father, I could see bits of myself in him. Same brown wavy hair. Same skin tone. And the same pale blue eyes that Granny had hated. But still, it didn’t seem real.
I rubbed my blurry eyes and opened the door to find Gabe standing there, already dressed in a fitted brown t-shirt, khaki pants, and combat boots. His sword hung from the belt on his back.
