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Thing shakes his head, as if disappointed in my answer. Which is even more infuriating. “You must go gently with your consort. She is small and these humans, easily damaged. She carries your kit, who is the hope of a future. If you cannot learn to be gentle, you will not be allowed to be in her presence.”
Behind Thing, Remus grins and rubs his hands together in anticipation of a fight.
He is not wrong. I want to rip into Thing for his words and insinuations. “I would not hurt my consort!”
“Perhaps that is what Creator-Father thought, too,” Thing says gravely. “And yet we all know how that turned out.”
His words slice like a knife, cutting off my retort at the knees.
Ah yes.
That which we don’t speak of. Not that we’ve spoken of much in the last two centuries since we lit our father’s dead body aflame and buried the ashes ten feet deep in the earth. Something we ought to have done about a millennium earlier.
Perhaps then our youngest brother would still be among us. He who always felt so much, the emptiness inside him as great as the starvation he inflicted on those doomed humans our Father set him upon. He’d connected to the consort our father brought home more than any of us, finding in her the gentling mother’s presence none of us had ever known.
And so when the day came that my father lost his temper—as he was prone to do—and he shoved her down the stairs…
We all who were so familiar with bloodshed came home from stalking the fire-choked Moscow streets, the Russian army recently fled and the French about to capture and loot, to find her bled out and our father commanding us to clean it up and get rid of her body—
Layden lost it.
He attacked our father. But, the youngest of us, he was best as a weapon of mass destruction, not hand-to-hand combat. He could weaken our father, but that was nothing to the Creator. Father had fought through hunger before. He toyed with our brother, torturing him before death by first slicing off his glorious wings and pouring burning hot hell-metal over his back so they would never grow back. We thought it would end there.
But when Layden continued calling our father a murderer, enraged, he turned and plunged a hell-metal sword through Layden’s too-soft heart.
While we all did nothing, staring on in bewildered shock.
Chapter Forty-One
HANNAH
I wake after a deep night’s sleep, breathing out in relief as I sit up and looking toward the door. I barred the door last night to keep Abaddon out. I was afraid as I climbed into bed that he’d simply break it down or fly in through the window. Frowning now, I think in my drowsy dreaming state I heard the loud thumping of him discovering the locked door, but he didn’t break it down.
For once, he has respected a boundary.
It’s too soon to really call it progress, but at least it’s something.
My stomach rumbles and, as the morning sun blazes in through the window, I know I can’t hide away in here forever. I need to go down to breakfast.
Half of me wants to climb back under the covers and pull them over my head. But my stomach gurgles again, reminding me that damn, I really am hungry. Like, starving. When did I last eat? Did I skip dinner last night? I can’t remember. Everything was just such a shock. Abaddon acting out like that. I skim my fingers over my neck.
And then finding out about the—
I shoot my other hand to my belly.
Jesus. I’ve forgotten, but now that I’ve remembered, it all seems so absurd.
I’m pregnant. Dear God. What am I going to do? What is there to do? Go down and have breakfast, I guess.
Then, like a knee-jerk reaction, I think of Drew’s voice on the sat phone. He has this thing where he would pull me into a hug after a long day and say, “Now you don’t have to worry about a thing anymore—you have me. I’ll take care of everything.”
And if I let him, he really would just sort of… take over.
It was such a relief at the beginning. He just barged right in and moved me out of Mom’s house, taking care of all the details of the move.
Then little by little, he took on more and more.
Small stuff at first. After all, it only made sense to share a cell phone plan. And after we moved in together, well, he really did have a better head for math… so it just made sense for him to take care of the bills. And since he was paying the bills, well, wasn’t it only logical to get a joint bank account so my paycheck could get directly deposited into it, so he could pay everything from there? We were about to get married anyway.
