Fallen (Seven Deadly Sins #2)(61)
Author: Erin McCarthy

He’d given her what he could.

Now he just wanted to watch her sleep.

Sara slept for fourteen hours. She couldn’t believe it. She’d been out cold from 5 p.m. to 7 the next morning. When she’d woken up, Gabriel had been sitting up in bed next to her reading the newspaper. Which meant not only had she slept, she had slept through his getting in and out of bed, possibly several times.

It felt like a major accomplishment. A triumph.

Then she and Gabriel had spent the day walking around the Quarter, playing tourist. The history he knew amazed her. He seemed to have a story, a thought, a reference for every street and nearly every building. He talked about the Pontalba, the Cabildo, the Creole ballroom on Orleans Street. But he never told the story she wanted to hear, which was that of his girlfriend.

She wouldn’t pry, but she wanted to know. Wanted him to trust her with his hurt, his guilt. But he never said anything.

Instead he just occasionally smiled at her and told her anecdotes about people long dead, and while it was entertaining, intriguing, it struck Sara that everything she and Gabriel did and talked about was driven by the dead.

It was an eerie thought.

When they sat down on the steps in front of the Mississippi River, the sun beating down on their backs, Sara knew they needed to finish their business with the dead, and move forward as the living. There were no answers. There had never been answers. There never would be definitive answers. It only was speculation and isolated facts.

“What do you want to do about the case?” she asked, leaning forward onto her knees. “I can give you a DNA sample for comparison to Anne Donovan’s. If we want rush results, I can overnight everything to my friend Jocelyn. She can do it in the lab after hours in a day or two.”

Maybe she should even go back to Florida herself for a few days. She did want to see Rafe before he left for the West Coast.

Strangely enough, she wasn’t feeling the fear anymore. The pictures, the newspaper article her mother had received, the absinthe bottle—it was all disturbing, and not her imagination. Someone was watching her. Someone who knew something. Possibly a murderer. Yet she felt like she had reached the bottom of the depths of her fear, had seen the worst, had lived with fear for so long that it no longer had the power to paralyze her.

Instead she felt a strange sort of calm, an acceptance.

Maybe it was getting a full night’s sleep.

Maybe it was looking at the horrific possibilities of all that could happen and realizing she couldn’t control the future, only her now.

Maybe it was the serenity of being with Gabriel, the magic of meeting someone who was a mirror, a reflection of all her pain and sorrow and yet hope. Sara glanced over at his profile, at his sharp nose, his beautiful cheekbones, his hair dancing in the small breeze.

Maybe it was falling in love.

Everything seemed easier to face when you had a man standing behind you with his hand on the small of your back.

She could be and was independent. Had been since the age of thirteen. But it was pleasant to have someone understand her, anticipate her, offer such a subtle support. Gabriel wasn’t the type for overblown gestures like flowers or public displays of affection, but she liked his quiet style better.

It was sexier to have him sketch her in private than to have him hold her hand in public.

No question about it, she was in love with him, and she had the conviction that they would be together. They were together. Sex, some sort of permanency, would come later, when they were both ready for it. But they were together.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, interrupting her dreamy sun-soaked musings.

“Yeah? What’s that?” Wary of his tone, she glanced over at him. He looked uncomfortable with whatever he was about to say.

“Doing a comparison in your lab is a good idea. And the thing is, we can take it a step further. Because now we know you’re Anne Donovan’s descendent.” He cleared his throat. “And I’m Jonathon Thiroux’s. So if your DNA and my DNA don’t have markers that match the blood found on the knife, then there was a third person in the room who nicked themselves when they stabbed Anne.”

Sara sat up straighter and gaped at him. “You’re Jonathon Thiroux’s descendent?”

He nodded, staring straight ahead at the river, fingers drumming on his knees.

“Were you planning on telling me?” And how dare he express indignation the day before that she had kept her biology a secret when he had been withholding the same information and still had, even after her confession?

“Probably. Eventually. But I didn’t want you to think I was biased. I actually don’t think Jonathon Thiroux did it, but I suspect you do.”

“I do think he did it. I think he was a psychopath.” It was the only thing that made sense to her. There hadn’t been anyone else in the vicinity that they could tell from the distance of a hundred and fifty years. The evidence was lousy, the facts all open for dispute. But no one had doubted that Jonathon Thiroux had been in the room. And it seemed the most logical explanation to Sara. In 1849 they hadn’t known what a psychopath was, nor had they access to forensic analysis. But the whole point of Gabriel’s book was that both were irrelevant when a conviction was at the mercy of a judge and jury influenced by the media.

Yet she thought he did it.

She added, “I think it’s natural to be biased if he’s an ancestor of yours. But I don’t think you have any reason to conclude that anyone other than Thiroux did it.” For some reason, she felt irritated with him. The whole case took on a different perspective knowing that he did in fact have some sort of personal stake in it. Not that she was any different. She’d withheld her own history from him too.

Yet she was still irritated, irrationally or not.

“And I think Rafe Marino killed your mother.”

“What?” Sara went from irritated to furious. “Why would you even say that? I told you it’s not Rafe.”

“Why are you so sure? Is it because you have feelings for him?”

Sara’s face went hot and her hand flew up. “Oh, you did not just say that.”

That Gabriel of all people would accuse her of pining for her mother’s lover made her furious. “Why can’t a man and a woman like each other without people assuming that they’re harboring secret love?”

“I don’t mean that you had a relationship, I just mean that if you care about him, it would be really hard to accept that he could do something so horrible. You said yourself that you didn’t want to believe he could be capable of that kind of violence because it called into question your judgment.”