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Sera’s been hard at work finding a convincing glamour that doesn’t make me look ridiculous.
It’s been hours. A labor of love only the closest friend would abide.
And she is. Sera’s one of the very few who knows how cruel my father can be to his own progeny.
She’s always been the one to heal the bruises and split lips when my hands shake too much to do so on my own.
“I still can’t believe you called your mother a fallen whore to his face.”
Not my finest moment. “Ididn’t truly say it.”
“No. You just thought it,” Sera says with a smirk, as if thinking it is somehow worse than saying it out loud.
My father’s public persona is so cultivated, so impeccably maintained, no one would believe how often his raised voice leads to a raised hand. To the rest of Celestus, Malachi Umbra is a ruthless leader, but a doting father. The hosts eat up the contrived persona.
They’re all too happy to assume I’m the only one who sees his softer side, but the reality is far more grim.
I’m the closest to his temper.
The number of times he’s paraded me—smiling and coiffed—to full host functions where he can publicly praise me as his strong, determined daughter, all the while squeezing the hidden bruises under the guise of fatherly affection…
“You know, this would be so much easier if you weren’t going to the only place where you can’t use your own magic to do this right. Now let me think.” Sera crosses her bedroom to the dresser and searches through the pouch of charmed items once again.
Her sleeping quarters—which I always think of as warm and soft because of the amber-toned light she favors—have always been close to mine, but not because we’re friends. Sera is my only cousin. The only angel remaining on her father’s line. So she’s always understood the unique pressure of being born into a high-profile family.
And Sera is the closest link I have to my mother.
Our mothers were sisters, pregnant with us at the same time. We were born just a few moons apart. Audra, Sera’s mother, always said we were destined to be fast friends.
Even when Aunt Audra left my father’s host for another, Seraphina stayed here.
With me.
Forme.
“Now remember,” she says, locking eyes with me in the mirror as she dumps the whole pouch of charmed baubles onto the polished wooden dresser. “Humans don’t speak like us. Don’t fall into that formal shit you do with your father.”
Malachi has always demanded precise words and clear meaning when speaking with him. It’s such a habit that sometimes I catch myself even thinking that way.
“And they don’t speak like all that garbage TV of theirs you still watch.
“Hey! First of all…”
Sera purses her lips at me.
Yeah, OK. She’s right. My taste in mortal realm entertainment is questionable.
But an angel’s got to have her guilty pleasures. And it’s not my fault I got hooked on it. There wasn’t much else to do in the hospital besides listen to nurse gossip, endure physical therapy, and watch trashy TV—a term I learned on said trashy TV.
I was only conscious for a week before Gael got me out, but that’s all it takes to get hooked on the dopamine of watching horrible people do horrible things.
I’d paid a tinkerer a ridiculous sum of latinum to smuggle a device back to Celestus and magic it to receive mortal realm media.
“Fine. What else?”
Sera’s special interest in university was Angel-Human relations. She’s spent nearly three years at a human college and is the closest thing I have to a mortal realm expert.
She was incredibly lucky to have the chance.
