Archangel’s Consort (Guild Hunter #3)(31)
Author: Nalini Singh

“I’m glad to see you have some sense of family obligation,” Jeffrey said in that razor blade of a voice. “I suppose you have had more important people to visit in the days since your return to the city.”

Anger, wild and hurting, slammed through the guilt. “They cared when you threw me out onto the street,” she said, glad to see him flinch. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand that kind of loyalty.” She didn’t know what she’d expected—that her father would be taken aback by her wings to the extent of dropping that glacial mask? That he’d look at her with wonder and awe? If she had, she was a fool.

“Jeffrey.” Gwendolyn’s mellifluous voice.

Jeffrey’s jaw was tight, his eyes glittering behind those thin metal frames, but he gave a jerky nod, said, “Come into the study. The girls?” The latter words were directed at his wife.

“In Amy’s room, with strict instructions not to come out.”

The tendons along Jeffrey’s neck went white with strain, but he said nothing as he walked into the study. Elena followed at a slower pace, wondering at the undercurrents she could sense. Maybe she’d been wrong about Gwendolyn. It certainly seemed like the other woman was flexing her claws.

Chewing on that, she found herself in a large room with mahogany bookshelves lined with leather-bound tomes, a solid desk of the same wood taking center stage. That still left plenty of room for the deep armchairs set to one side, near the French doors. It wasn’t only a masculine room, it was devoid of even the slightest feminine touch.

Snick.

The sound of the lock clicking into place as Gwendolyn closed the door was loud in the silence. Needing space, Elena walked to the French doors and swung them open, shifting to lean against the doorjamb, one of her wings exposed to the crisp spring air, the other to the emotional chill inside the library.

Jeffrey stood on the other side of the room, against a bookshelf, his arms folded. “So, you’re an angel.”

“I’m afraid asking me to whore myself for you isn’t going to work any better this time than it did the last,” Elena snapped out, her calm disappearing in the face of that judgmental gaze.

White lines bracketed Jeffrey’s mouth. “You’re my daughter. I shouldn’t have had to go through your Guild to find out if you were alive.”

“Please.” Elena gave a bitter laugh. “When have you cared whether I lived or died?” Not once in the ten years of their estrangement had he bothered to check up on her, even when she’d been badly injured in a hunt, hospitalized for weeks. “Just tell me why I’m here so I can get back to my life.”

It was Gwendolyn who spoke from her position by the door, her body held in a way Elena would’ve never expected from Jeffrey’s perfect society wife. “It’s Evelyn,” she said in a quiet, determined tone. “She’s like you.”

“No.” The single word was gritted out by Jeffrey.

“Stop it.” Gwendolyn turned on her husband. “Denying it won’t make it any less true!”

Jeffrey’s response was lost in the buzz of noise inside Elena’s head as she tried to make sense of the curveball Gwendolyn had just thrown her. “Like me? How?” She wasn’t going to make any assumptions, not here.

Gwendolyn’s lips pursed tight, her hands fisted at her sides as she stared at her husband. When Jeffrey didn’t speak, the black-haired woman turned to Elena. “Hunter-born,” she said. “My baby is hunter-born.”

If Elena hadn’t been braced against the doorjamb, she’d have collapsed—her body felt as if it had taken a tremendous blow. Disbelief had her saying, “That’s not possible.” Hunter-born were rare, very rare, being birthed with the ability to scent-track vampires. However, it did run in families—Elena had always believed her ability came from her mother’s unknown bloodline.

“We’ve run tests,” Jeffrey snapped out. “Using Harrison and some of his friends. She can track them.”

Harrison was a vampire, and Elena’s brother-in-law, married to Marguerite’s only other surviving daughter—Beth. The fact that Evelyn could track him … “You,” Elena whispered, staring at Jeffrey. “It comes from you.” He’d known, she thought, glimpsing the flash of some unnamable emotion in his eyes. All this time, when he’d been rejecting her for her “base, inhuman” occupation, he’d known it was his blood that had given it to her.

A muscle pulsed along Jeffrey’s temple, his skin pulled taut over that aristocratic bone structure. “That has no place in this conversation.”

Elena laughed. Harsh, jagged. She couldn’t help it. “You hypocrite.”

His head snapped toward her. “Be quiet, Elieanora. I’m still your father.”

The hell of it was that part of her was still the little girl who’d once adored him, and that part wanted to obey. Fighting the urge, she was about to retort when she glimpsed Gwendolyn’s face. The other woman looked shattered, and all at once, Elena’s anger with her father, his fury at her, wasn’t the most important thing. It would keep. It had kept for over a decade.

“She’ll need training,” she said, speaking to Gwendolyn. “Without it, she’ll find it difficult to focus and concentrate.” The cacophony of scents in the air, especially in a city as full of vampires as New York, could severely impact one of the hunter-born. Elena had taught herself to filter out the endless “noise” in the years before she grew old enough to join the Guild without parental permission, but it had been a painful, lonely road. One Evelyn didn’t have to take. “You need to register her at Guild Academ—”

“No!” Jeffrey’s voice was rigid with withheld rage. “I will not have another daughter of mine tainted by that place.”

“It’s a school,” Elena said, keeping a white-knuckled grip on a temper that pulled aggressively at the reins. “It has specialized teachers.”

“She will not be a hunter.”

“She already is, you bastard!” Elena yelled, the reasoned adult falling apart under the echoes of childhood. “If you’re not careful, you’ll lose her the same way you lost me!”

The blow hit. She saw it.

For herself, she wouldn’t have fought. But for Evelyn, she pushed forward, using the advantage. “Being hunter-born isn’t a choice. It’s part of our very makeup. If you ask her to make a choice, she’ll probably choose you.” Before Jeffrey could pounce on that, she added, “And she’ll go mad if not in the next few years, then in the next decade.” The urge to hunt was a pulse in the blood, a hunger that could consume if caged.