Angels' Blood (27 page)

She shrugged, her mouth pinched.

“Your father.”

Her shoulders tightened. “What, you can listen in to conversations now?”

“Even archangels can’t do that.” Not always true, but true in this case since he’d vowed not to eavesdrop on her mind. “But I did my research.”

“Good for you.” If words could cut, he’d have been shredded.

He looked down at his bloody fist and wondered if she saw him as a monster now. “Jeffrey Deveraux is the only human being you seem unable to handle.”

“Like I said, it’s none of your business.” Her jaw was clenched so tight, she had to be in pain.

“Are you sure?”

 

 

Raphael’s question repeated over and over in Elena’s head
as she strode up the steps to the tony brownstone her father maintained as his private office. There was another office high up in a tower of steel and glass, but this was where the real wheeling and dealing went on. It was also a place you entered only by invitation.

Elena had never set foot across the threshold.

Now she stopped in front of the closed door, her eye falling on the discreet metal plaque to the left.

 

VEVERAUX ENTERPRISES,
EST. 1701

 

The Deveraux family could trace their roots back so many years, Elena sometimes thought they must’ve kept records even while crawling out of the primordial ooze. Her lips tightened. Pity the other side of her familial ledger wasn’t so established. An orphaned immigrant raised in foster homes on the outskirts of Paris, Marguerite had had no family history to speak of—nothing beyond the vague memory of her mother’s Moroccan origins. But she’d been beautiful, her skin gold, her hair close to pure white.

And her hands . . . gifted hands, hands that wove magic.

Elena had never been able to understand why her parents had married. Most likely, she never would. The parent who might have told her was dead and the one who remained seemed to have forgotten he’d once had a wife named Marguerite, a woman who spoke with an accent and laughed loud enough to banish any silence.

She wondered if her father ever thought about Ariel and Mirabelle, or if he’d erased them from his world, too.

She shook her head in a harsh negative, trying to wipe away the mishmash of nauseating images. What Raphael had done . . . it had been another reminder that he wasn’t human, wasn’t anything close to human. But the Archangel of New York wasn’t the monster she’d come to face.

Raising her hand, she pressed the buzzer and looked up at the discreet security camera most execs probably never made. The door opened a second later. It wasn’t Jeffrey on the other side. Elena hadn’t expected it to be. Her father was much too important a man to open the door for his eldest living child. Even when he hadn’t seen that child for ten cold years.

“Ms. Deveraux?” A perfunctory smile from the small brunette. “Please come in.”

Elena stepped inside, taking in the woman’s ghost-pale skin against the sedate navy color of her well-cut suit. She was every inch the executive assistant, the lone touches of flamboyance coming from the glittering diamond on her right middle finger, and the high mandarin collar of her jacket. Elena drew in a deep breath, felt her lips curve.

The woman’s spine went stiff. “I’m Geraldine, Mr. Deveraux’s personal assistant.”

“Elena.” She shook the woman’s hand, noted the cool temperature. “I’d suggest you get yourself a prescription for iron.”

Geraldine’s calm expression flickered only slightly. “I’ll take that under advisement.’

“You do that.” Elena wondered if her father had any idea of his assistant’s extracurricular pursuits. “My father?”

“Please follow me.” A hesitation. “He doesn’t know.” Not a plea, almost an angry declaration made in clipped private-school vowels.

“Hey, what you do in your own time is nobody’s business but yours.” Elena shrugged, mind filling with the image of Dmitri bending over that blonde’s neck. Of the hunger in his eyes after she cut his throat. “I just hope it’s worth it.”

The other woman gave a soft, intimate smile before leading Elena down the hall. “Oh, it is. It’s better than anything you could imagine.”

Elena doubted that, not when she kept flashing back to Raphael’s hand on her breast, powerful, possessive, more than a little dangerous. Too bad she couldn’t forget that same hand shoving through a man’s rib cage to tear out his heart.

Geraldine halted in front of a closed wooden door. She gave a quiet knock and drew back. “Please go in. Your father is waiting for you.”

“Thank you.” She put her hand on the doorknob.

Jeffrey Deveraux stood by the fireplace, hands in the pockets
of a pin-striped suit she guessed had been tailored to his tall frame. Marguerite had been a bare five feet tall. It was Jeffrey who’d given Elena her height. He was six feet four without shoes—not that her father was ever anything less than perfectly put together.

Pale gray eyes met hers with the cold watchfulness of a hawk or a wolf. His face was all sharp lines and angles, his hair brushed back from a severe widow’s peak. Most men would’ve had gray in their hair by now. Jeffrey had gone straight from aristocratic gold to pure white. It suited him, throwing his features into sharper relief.

“Elieanora.” He finished polishing his spectacles and slid them back on, the thin rectangular frames as effective as ten-inch-thick walls.

“Jeffrey.”

His mouth tightened. “Don’t be childish. I’m your father.”

She shrugged, shifting into an unconsciously aggressive posture. “You wanted me. Here I am.” The words came out angry. Ten years of independence and the second she entered her father’s presence, she reverted to teenager who’d spent a lifetime begging for his love and been kicked in the guts for her efforts.

“I’m disappointed,” he said, unmoved. “I’d hoped you’d picked up some social graces from the company you’ve been keeping.”

She frowned. “My company is the same as always. You’ll have seen Sara, the Guild Director, at various events, and Ransom—”

“What your
hunter
”—said with a grimace of distaste—“friends do is of no interest to me.”

“I didn’t think so.” Why the fuck had she come to heel at his command? Her only excuse was shock. “So why did you bring them up?”

“I was referring to the angels.”

She blinked, then wondered why she was surprised. Jeffrey had a finger in every major pie in the city, not all of them strictly legal. Though of course, he’d flay her alive if she dared imply he was anything other than lily-white. “You’d be surprised at what they consider acceptable.” Raphael’s pitiless justice, Michaela’s hungry sexuality, Uram’s butchery, none of it would fit with her father’s perception of the angels.

He waved off her words as if they didn’t matter. “I need to talk to you about your inheritance.”

Elena’s fist clenched. “You mean the trust my
mother
set up for me.” She could’ve starved on the streets and Jeffrey wouldn’t have given a damn.

Skin pulled taut over Jeffrey’s cheekbones. “I suppose genetics do tell.”

She was one step away from calling him a bastard but ironically, it was her mother’s voice that held her back. Marguerite had brought her up to respect her father. Elena couldn’t do that, but she could respect her mother’s memory. “Thank God,” she said, letting him take the insult as he would.

Swiveling, Jeffrey walked to the desk set below the windows on the other side of the room, his steps silent on the deep claret of the Persian carpet. “The trust matured on your twenty-fifth birthday.”

“A bit late, aren’t you?”

He picked up an envelope. “A letter was sent to you by the solicitors.”

Elena recalled throwing the unopened piece of mail in the trash. She’d figured it for yet another attempt at coercing her into selling out the shares she’d inherited in the family firm—through her paternal grandfather, a man who’d actually seemed to love her. “They did a real knock-up job of following up.”

“Don’t try to pass off your own laziness on others.” Walking back, he shoved the envelope into her hand. “The money’s been deposited in an interest-bearing account under your name. The details are all there.”

She didn’t look down. “Why the personal touch?”

Pale gray eyes narrowed behind the spectacles. “Distasteful as I find your choice of occupation—”

“It’s not a choice,” she said coldly. “
Remember?
”

Silence that warned her to never again bring up that bloody day.

“As I was saying, regretful as your profession is, it does bring you into contact with some powerful people.”

Her stomach soured. What the hell had she expected? She knew she meant nothing to her father. Still she’d come. Instead of lashing out as she might’ve done as a teenager, she kept her mouth shut, wanting to know exactly what it was he expected of her.

“You’re in a position to help the family.” A steely-eyed gaze. “Something you’ve never cared to do.”

Her hand clenched on the envelope. “I’m only a hunter,” she said, turning his words back on him. “What makes you think they treat me any better than you do?”

He didn’t flinch. “I’ve been told you’re spending considerable time with Raphael, that he may be open to suggestions that come from you.”

She told herself he wasn’t implying what she thought he was implying. Shaking inside, she met his eyes. “You’d whore out your own daughter?”

No change in his expression. “No. But if she’s already doing it herself, I see no reason not to take advantage.”

She felt herself go sheet white. Without a word, she turned, opened the door, and walked out. It slammed shut behind her. A second later, she heard something smash, the discordant splintering of crystal against brick. She halted, stunned at the thought that she’d evoked any kind of a response from the always controlled Jeffrey Deveraux.

“Ms. Deveraux?” Geraldine came running around the corner. “I heard . . .” Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“I’d suggest you make yourself scarce for the next little while,” Elena said, snapping out of her frozen state and heading toward the door. Jeffrey had probably lost it because she’d dared defy him, unlike the rest of his band of sycophants. It had had nothing to do with the fact that he’d called his daughter a whore to her face. “And, Gerry”—she turned at the door—“don’t ever let him find out.”

The assistant gave a jerky nod.

Elena had never been so grateful to be out in the noise of the city as she was that day. Not giving the door a backward look, she walked down the steps and away from the man who’d contributed his sperm to her creation. Her hand clenched again and she remembered the envelope. Forcing herself to calm down enough that she could think, she slit it open and pulled out the letter. This was her mother’s legacy to her and she refused to let Jeffrey cheapen it.

The amount of money was small in the scheme of things—Marguerite’s estate had been split equally between her two living daughters, and consisted of the money she’d made from the sale of her one-of-a-kind quilts. She’d never needed to use any of it because Jeffrey had insisted on giving her a huge allowance.

Elena staggered under the impact of the memory, then brushed it aside—it was nothing more than wishful thinking. Her father had always been a stern disciplinarian who didn’t know how to forgive. But, she was forced to admit, he
had
felt something for his Parisian wife—there had been that huge allowance, gifts of jewels on every occasion. Where had all those treasures gone? To Beth?

Elena didn’t particularly care about their monetary value, but she would’ve liked to have just one thing that had once belonged to her mother. All she knew was that she’d come home one summer from boarding school and found every trace of Marguerite, Mirabelle, and Ariel gone from the house—including the quilt Elena had treasured since her fifth birthday. It was as if she’d imagined her mother, her older sisters.

Someone smashed into her shoulder. “Hey, lady! Get out of the fucking way!” The lanky student turned to give her the finger.

She returned the gesture automatically, glad he’d broken her paralysis. A quick glance at her watch confirmed she still had some breathing room. Deciding to take care of things then and there, she made her way to the bank branch specified in the letter. Luckily, it was fairly close. She’d completed the paperwork and was rising to leave when the bank manager said, “Would you like to see the contents of the safe-deposit box, Ms. Deveraux?”

She stared into his puffy face, the probable result of too much good food and not enough exercise. “A safe-deposit box?”

He nodded, straightening his tie. “Yes.”

“Don’t I need a key and”—she frowned—“my signature on the access card?” She knew that only because she’d had to look it up during a particularly complicated hunt.

“Normally, yes.” He straightened his tie for the second time. “Yours is a somewhat unusual situation.”

Translation: her father had pulled any number of strings for God alone knew what reasons of his own. “All right.”

Five minutes later, she’d had her signature witnessed and was handed a key. “If you’ll follow me to the vault—we use a dual-step system here. I have the key to the vault; you have the one to the box itself.” The bank manager turned and led her through the hushed confines of the solid old building and through to the back.

The safe-deposit boxes were hidden behind several electronic doors that appeared incongruous in the belly of the historic structure.