Angels' Blood (Guild Hunter #1)(66)

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.

Ari's eyes staring into hers as she screamed. Belle's blood on the kitchen tiles. Her bare foot sliding on the liquid, the jarring hardness of the floor as she fell. Warm wetness against her palm.

A hand clutching a still-beating heart.

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 f*ck 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.