Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(58)
Author: Erin McCarthy

He was in love with her.

Yet she deserved so much more than him, a damaged burned-out shell of a man, with guilt that clawed and ate at him, and a control that vacillated depending on the day.

“How’s Rochelle?” she asked, head still in his shirt.

It was that concern, that compassion, that intensity of heart and soul and feeling that he admired, adored, in Sara, and it was the very thing that would crush her if he let their relationship go any further. There was no future for them. He had to acknowledge that. Even more so now that he knew about Raphael.

“She was doing okay. She was awake when her parents got there. She seemed confused and embarrassed more than anything else.” Gabriel stroked Sara’s hip. “I feel so damn bad about what happened.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Indirectly, it was. He knew that. Accepted responsibility. Hated it, and wanted to fix it. But didn’t know how. If he thought for one minute he could get a straight answer, he would go to a demon, like Alex, and ask if they knew how he could end his punishment. But he suspected Alex would either mock him or give him false answers for his own personal amusement. He had distanced himself from all the other demons, including Marguerite, who he had once considered a friend. He hadn’t spoken to her since she’d betrayed him and lied during his trial.

“You need to stop doing that,” she said.

“Doing what?”

“Your silence is your denial. You don’t say anything when you disagree with me. It’s something I’ve noticed. Obviously you don’t like conflict any more than I do. But in this case, you are wrong. You’re not responsible for whatever is wrong with Rochelle. She imagined a relationship, and she obviously has some serious issues that have nothing to do with you.”

Or Rochelle had fallen victim to his demon lure. But Sara was right. He wasn’t going to argue with her. There was no way to argue his point. And while it bothered him that Sara didn’t know all of him, didn’t understand the true depth of who he was and what he had seen, done, there was no option to tell her the truth. She would think he was insane and leave.

And he couldn’t let her go.

“I guess this is where I stay silent again.”

She gave a muffled laugh. “You’re a good man, Gabriel St. John.”

He wished he could claim that. “I haven’t tried hard enough. I’m going to try harder from here on out.” He needed to fight for redemption, for the right to live among mortals without the danger of causing them harm. He wanted the opportunity to use his gifts again, for the pleasure of people, and to inspire, to allow them to see beauty around and within themselves.

Escape no longer appealed.

He was ready to change, to make it all right.

“Gabriel, I have something to tell you.” Sara took a deep breath, not at all sure how Gabriel was going to respond to the fact that she had lied to him. But she needed to tell him, now, before they went any further. He had let her into his life, into his work and his apartment. Into his sketching and his music. He had offered her comfort, security, passion, and understanding. He had looked at her and let her know that he knew what it was like, how she felt, what grief and fear and addiction could do.

She owed him the truth.

“What’s up?” he asked, squeezing her upper arm.

It was hard as hell to peel herself off of him and meet his eye, but she did it, because she was tired of being afraid, exhausted from the cowering and the worrying and the looking over her shoulder all the time. “There’s something I didn’t tell you about myself. I agreed to help you on this book because I wanted to solve my mother’s murder, that’s true. But I thought that was really a long shot . . . that if the police couldn’t solve it and the court couldn’t get a conviction, then there was nothing I could do. But I thought maybe in going through the case, comparing it to Anne Donovan’s, I could find some closure.”

She wrapped herself tighter around him, knowing he would pull away, not wanting him to. “Because what I haven’t told you is that I’m interested in Anne Donovan’s case because she was my great-great-grandmother. And I want to know why the women in my family are murdered the same way, generation after generation.”

Gabriel’s eyebrow went up as he stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“I’m Anne Donovan’s descendent.” She could feel it—he was moving away, trying to disengage himself from her arms— but she hung on. “And the coincidences between her murder and my mother’s scared me. That’s why I came here.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? We have your DNA—we could have done a comp to see if our blood samples were Anne’s or John Thiroux’s or someone else’s entirely.” His hands were on her elbows now, trying to gently push her away. “You let me waste an entire afternoon looking to see if Anne Donovan had a child, when you knew she did. You knew the kid’s name. You knew I was trying to track a descendent.”

“I know and I’m sorry.” She had felt guilty about that. “But the thing is, I didn’t want you to think I was a nutjob. That I had ulterior motives or a bias.” Maybe she hadn’t really had a good reason, but she had been protecting herself. Plain and simple. “Everyone for the past year has been looking at me with pity, Gabriel, waiting for me to crack. They think I’m insane, and maybe I am. But the one secret I managed to keep during this whole ugly investigation and trial is that in every generation of my family, a woman has been murdered. Can you imagine the kind of story the media would make out of that? I’d be a freak show, looked at with pity, fascination, horror. I would have no chance at a normal life.” Just the thought of the headlines, the media camped out on her lawn again, the flash photography going off in her face, filled her with panic. “I swear, some loon would probably even murder me just to be the one who sealed the ‘curse.’ ”

Why wasn’t he saying anything? He was just looking at her, eyes narrowed, frowning, head shaking slightly. “So you’re saying that every generation has had a murder? What kind of murder? Domestic violence, robbery shooting, or random unsolved murder?”

“All of them were random unsolved murders.” A chill went up her spine just saying it out loud. “My mother never seemed to think it was a big deal. She used to joke about it. I personally find it scary as hell. But I’m trying to tell myself it’s a horrible coincidence, that the women in my family who were murdered all lived edgy, dangerous lives. With the exception of my grandmother. As far as I can tell, she was just a suburban housewife.”