AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m asking for what’s necessary. It’s the only way forward. Ilarion wants to marry Celine; well, she’s not going to marry him if she knows I’m carrying his baby.”
Mila mumbles something and gets to her feet. I think she’s about to walk out on my request, but she turns to me with a sympathetic smile. “You’ve been cooped up in this room for long enough. Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“Outside. A walk in the gardens will do us both some good. Unless, of course, you’d rather stay in here and get even pastier than you already are.”
I roll my eyes, but join her. “So I need a tan. Fine. But why will it doyougood? Something going on?”
“Oh, you’re a regular super sleuth, aren’t you?” She rolls her eyes. “There’s no particular reason, honestly. Not anymore. I just got into the habit of walking the grounds when I was younger. I guess it was an attempt to outrun my demons.”
I frown. “Do you have a lot of those?”
“I did,” she replies. “But my dad is dead now. So there’s one less than there used to be.”
38
TAYLOR
It’s hard not to gawk. The gardens at the Diamond are an endless labyrinth of lush hedges and ancient trees. Around one corner is a water-lined grotto; around another is a grid of statues watching over the night.
Mila catches me looking around slack-jawed. I hear her chuckle softly under her breath. “It’s a lot, I know. I forget that sometimes. It’s hard to remember that not everyone grows up with—”
“Fairytale castles on every coast?”
She laughs again. It’s funny how much her face changes when she smiles. Mostly, it makes me realize how little she does it. “Right. People think that that’s enough reason to be happy, but I haven’t met a single property that’s made me feel as good as a person can.”
I glance at her sidelong. “Who’s your special person?”
Mila rolls her eyes. “There is no special person. It was a general statement.”
“Sure. And I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
She gives me the finger as she pretends to scratch her nose. “Come on, wiseass,” she mutters, gesturing to a huge tree that looks out over the rest of the property from a perch at the top of a gentle hill. She sits down against its trunk and pats the grass at her side.
“What’s your dad like?” she blurts once I settle in. “Are you close with him?”
“More so when I was a kid,” I admit. “As Celine and I got older…things changed.”
“What kind of things?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I used to think that Mom’s cancer pushed him over the edge. Made him paranoid and scared of his own shadow. But honestly, it started before she was diagnosed. He started seeing, like, capital-Ddangereverywhere. He stopped letting Cee and me have sleepovers; he used to insist on dropping and picking us up from school because he didn’t want us taking the bus. If he could’ve implanted tracking chips in our skulls, he wouldn’t have even hesitated.”
“Sounds like a lot.”
“To say the least. Things got worse after Mom was diagnosed. It’s like he thought the world was out to get him.”
“But you still love him?”
“Of course I do. He’s my dad. And as annoying as it is to have him hover over us all the time, Celine and I both know he does it because he loves us. He wants to keep us safe, like any other father.”
Mila snorts. “Not all fathers are like yours, Taylor. Not all mothers, either.”
I tilt my head to look at her in the gloom. She’s got Ilarion’s chiseled profile, though slightly blurred, feminized at the harshest edges. “You said your dad was your demon.”
It’s not really a question, and I don’t really expect an answer. It’s more of a game. Me wondering which topic is going to be the one that shuts her down. Talking to these people is like walking on eggshells—if the eggs all had bombs inside.
“I don’t think he was capable of being anything else. Not all Bratvapakhansare like Ilarion.”
