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“What’s going on, my girl. Talk to your favorite auntie.”
Nalla as an adult was a combination of both her parents, her long, multicolored hair and yellow eyes clearly her father Zsadist’s, her steady nature absolutely Bella all over. She was such a good person, working at Luchas House, loyal to her friends and extended family of Brotherhood cousins, a devoted daughter.
But she wasn’t happy tonight. Hadn’t been happy for a while, come to think of it.
Muttering under her breath, the female rinsed out the pot using the nozzle and put it aside on the drying rack—where it couldn’t stay. If Fritz came in and saw it there, he was going to worry that he hadn’t cleaned the thing fast enough, even though he hadn’t been at home when Beth had boiled up the potatoes about an hour ago.
She was going to have to put it away before he returned to argue in a desperate, respectful way about who was preparing Last Meal.
Nalla dried her hands on a dish towel and turned around. “You know Cellia? At the House?”
“Oh, sure.” Beth took a sip from her mug of coffee. “Mary trained her.”
“She got engaged.”
“Oh, how nice—”
“She asked me to be her maid of honor.”
“That’s great.” Beth lifted an eyebrow as the girl looked away. “Wait, is it not great? So this is bad. Okay, I hate it, it’s terrible.”
Nalla’s stare drifted around, and for a second, Beth measured her own spaces, the ones she had been living in for three decades. The ground-up floors of the house were modest, just a regular-looking Colonial in a street packed with other, regular-looking houses. It was the underground that was extensive. The house had been built specifically for her, after she’d insisted she was fine in something far less… vault-like, for lack of a better word. But the Brotherhood had prevailed, and construction had started in what had been vacant farmland just outside the ring of Caldwell’s suburbia.
There were well over a dozen houses in the neighborhood, and they were all connected by a tunnel system. Rhage and Mary were on her left. Tohr and Autumn were on her right. Across the street were Z and Bella, and all the others filled out the street. Fritz and the doggen took care of everyone, staying in underground quarters themselves.
On the surface, it all looked perfectly human, perfectly normal, just as V had designed it to be. Underneath was where the truth lived.
She just hadn’t been able to stay in the mansion, with memories everywhere haunting her. Frankly, neither had the others. But the Brotherhood had refused to scatter, and besides, they were right. The Lessening Society had come back in full force, and the demon Devina was a permanent fixture in Caldwell… so circling the wagons was a safety-first move.
“It’s never going to happen for me,” Nalla said. “The marriage thing.”
Funny, Beth thought, how assimilation had happened over time. Sure, people still used “mating” to refer to tying the knot, but now “wedding” and “husband and wife” were equally common in speech.
So was “widow.”
“Don’t say that.” She looked at the girl and swallowed through a tight throat. “You never know what destiny has in store.”
For good, and for bad.
As she took a sip to clear the block in her throat, an old, familiar pain flared in her chest. Immediately after Wrath’s death, her grief had been white-hot and paralyzing, capable of leveling her for days. Over time, the acute phase had eased into a chronic, low-level hum that was always with her. She’d come to think of her mourning like the weather, something that ebbed and flowed, and sometimes stormed, and rarely, but on occasion, destroyed her anew.
Like it was flexing just to prove it was still in charge.
And what had she learned? After all this time? Well, it was that all she could do was walk through the rain and wind, and the cold, cold climate of her grief. Wrath’s absence had brought a nuclear winter to her life, and for her, there was no ultimate recovery. She remained the earth, lashed and set upon, hurtling through an icy void, even as other people’s stars continued to shine.
And it was what it was.
Nalla crossed her arms over her chest. “They won’t even talk to me.”
Plugging back into the conversation, Beth shook herself to attention. “Who won’t?”
“Males. Of any description.”
“I’m sure that’s not true—”
“They’re afraid of my father. Terrified. One of the groomsmen told Cellia that if I was in the wedding, he didn’t want to get paired with me to walk down the aisle during the ceremony. He said he was afraid he’d wind up in a ditch in pieces.”
Beth opened her mouth to deny it. But then had to close things up. Hmm, how to put this. “Zsadist is… a little protective of you, maybe.”
