Persecuted

“Elena, are you all right?” Strong fingers closed around her arm, offering support.

Her heart lurched. Just with surprise, she told herself. Joseph seemed more the type to shake someone than hold her. Curiously enough she’d always respected that about him, that he wasn’t the type to coddle anyone, that he was so strong that he demanded strength from those around him.

When she opened her eyes, his head was close. He had to be leaning, because he was tall, well over six feet with wide shoulders and a chest so muscular it strained the buttons on his gray shirt and suit. His deep green eyes softened with concern. Elena wasn’t used to a man looking at her like that, not since her father died. But underneath the concern was something that unsettled her even more, an awareness that hummed between them; another reason she could never use his first name. For them, it would be too intimate.

Like her dream.

She resisted the urge to tremble and lifted her chin instead. “I’m fine.”

“Yes, you are,” he agreed, his voice deepening with innuendo as he teased her. He always teased her.

Her palm itched to slap him. He didn’t know that she’d filed for divorce. She’d told no one yet. For all he knew she was a happily married woman. Didn’t anyone respect marriage anymore?

Heat warmed her face, as an image from the dream tugged at her memory. Arms and chest rippling with muscles, wrapping tight around her, pulling her close so that skin brushed skin. She drew in a shuddery breath. But that had been just a dream, not a vision. She was never going to make love with him. She would make certain of it, and if she could change that part of her future, she could change more.

She was here, in her grandmother’s wing, because she couldn’t keep ignoring her visions. They weren’t going away; they just kept getting worse. Not for her, but for the people she saw in them. She had to help. Like that ancestor who had so long ago warned about the lightning that would cause the house fire and begin the vendetta, Elena had to take the risk—even if she was the one who wound up getting burned.

“Excuse me,” she said, stepping around Joseph. “I need to speak to her.”

Then she closed the door, shutting him into the hall and herself into her grandmother’s rooms. The parlor, a profusion of Victorian roses and fragile, antique furniture, misled the visitor into thinking Thora Jones a delicate, old-fashioned woman. Nothing could be further from the reality.

Double doors led off the empty parlor into the den. Without knocking, Elena opened those doors into her grandmother’s real sanctum: dark, heavy woods, dim light and the faint, lingering odor of pungently sweet cigars. Elena had never caught her smoking them, but she suspected it was one of her grandmother’s many vices.

The woman lifted her gaze from the files on her desk, which was cluttered with more picture frames than work. Most of the photographs were of Elena’s father, Elijah Jones. The only ones of Elena were snapshots taken with him. Thora’s parlor also had several pictures of him, among the gardening ribbons and plaques, but this room with its faint light and solemn atmosphere felt more like a shrine to him.

This was where, since his death, Thora worshipped her son.

Elena turned her attention from the framed photographs to the woman behind the desk. Her grandmother’s hair was as blond as Elena’s, her eyes as eerily blue. Despite her seventy-three years, very few lines marred her pale complexion. Sometimes Elena wondered if her grandmother had sold her soul for beauty or immortality, but that thought was ridiculous.

Thora had sold her soul for vengeance.

Chapter 2

The older woman leaned back in her chair. But Elena suspected the nonchalance was feigned; tension emanated from Thora’s trim body. “So…you’re finally paying your grandmother a visit? How sweet.” From her sarcastic tone, she considered it anything but.

So did Elena. “We need to talk.”

Thora expelled an exasperated sigh. “I hope you’re not going to bring up that foolishness of moving out again. It’s your home, too. Your father saw to that in his will. And I think we’ve done very well these past six months at staying out of each other’s way,” she pointed out, then added, “until now.”

“I’m not here to talk about moving out.” Although she intended to, once her divorce from Kirk was settled, this house had never been her home. But she had something far more important than moving to discuss. Because Elena had yet to tell her grandmother about Ariel, because she wasn’t certain that she should, she said, “I have to find them.”

To her credit Thora didn’t ask who, even though they hadn’t had this conversation for a long time, since Elena was a girl desperate to be reunited with her mother and half sisters. “Not this again.”

“You know where they are.” Thora knew everything. Sometimes Elena wondered if she, too, was cursed. In a way, she supposed Thora was, but her special abilities were money and power. The only problem was she would never have enough of either to make her happy. The money couldn’t buy her happiness; it hadn’t even been able to save her only child.

“What’s brought this on? Is this about your father?” Thora asked.

So much of the past twenty years had been about her father. He’d been sick for so long his death should have been a relief, but Elena still ached for missing him. She shook her head. “No.”

“You’re missing him so much that you want to find some other family now,” Thora speculated. “They’re not your family, Elle.”

“They’re my sisters, and I need to find them.” An image flashed through her mind, of the curly dark-haired woman tied to a makeshift stake, of flames rising up around her, swallowing her as she was trapped in the middle, screaming. Even though pain hammered at her temples, she raised her voice, shouting, “Now!”

Thora’s eyes widened with surprise over Elena’s vehemence. Then her mouth twisted into a patronizing smile. “You aren’t a little girl anymore, Elle. It’s past time you grow up and realize they won’t want to see you. You’re the reason they were split up, that they grew up in foster homes. They know that, and they must hate you for it.”

She’d heard this first when she was twelve; it hurt no less now, all these years later. But she wasn’t a child anymore. She could hold back the tears and hide the pain, but she’d done that even at twelve, convincing herself that Thora lied to her, that her mom and sisters were still together. Lying to herself was smarter than showing her grandmother any sign of weakness; instinctively she’d known that then. That, like so many other things, hadn’t changed over the past twenty years.

Drawing on her strength and pride, Elena lifted her chin and revealed, “Ariel doesn’t hate me.”

The color drained from Thora’s face. “You’ve already found one of them?”

“She found me.” By accident. She’d actually been looking for Thora, to confront the person who’d sworn out the complaint that had separated their family. Elena would make certain that meeting never happened. She didn’t want her grandmother treating Ariel the way she’d treated Elena, with resentment and bitterness at their mother.

“If she’s talking to you now, it’s only because she doesn’t know everything. Yet.” Thora shook her head, as if she pitied Elena, but a small, satisfied smile played around her mouth. “Maybe I should enlighten her.”

“No.” Ariel deserved to know the truth, but Elena was the one who needed to tell her. Not Thora. Twenty years ago Elena hadn’t been able to protect her sisters from Thora’s manipulations, but now she was older and wiser. She wouldn’t let Thora hurt them again.

The older woman threatened, “I will tell her some interesting family secrets, if you don’t drop this now. If you don’t stay away from them.”

“She is my family. I have a right to speak to her. And Irina.” Again the vision flashed into her mind, in a bright beam of light, the woman trapped in the middle of the flames. Instead of cigars, Elena caught the odor of wood smoke; it burned in her nostrils, the image was so real. “I need to find Irina.”

Thora’s blue eyes flickered, the first sign of genuine annoyance. “Those women are nothing to you anymore. They never were. Accept that.”

Frustration clutched at Elena’s throat, making it hard for her to draw a breath. She wanted to scream, to throw things. But she restrained all those urges. She’d learned well how to control herself the past twenty years. She could restrain her passion and her temper—but not the visions. She’d never learned how to control her ability, only how to deny it.

Thora sighed. “I can’t believe how ungrateful you are. I saved you from that life, from that hand- to-mouth existence and brought you here, to live in luxury, with a father who loved you.”

She never claimed to love Elena though. If not for how devoted she’d been to her son, Elena would have thought Thora incapable of love. But was that obsessive devotion to Elijah, like when she’d deliberately broken up Elena’s family, really love or something darker?

As dark as the man who lurked in the shadows of Elena’s visions, his face obscured but his intentions clear?

She ignored her grandmother’s diatribe. She had come to reason with Thora, not argue. “Ariel found me because we’re in danger. We need to find Irina, to warn her, too.”

Thora shook her head as her thin lips twisted with disgust. “I thought you were smarter than that. How much money did Ariel want for this information? How much were you foolish enough to pay her?”

“She doesn’t want my money.”

Ariel was probably one of the few people to whom wealth meant nothing. She cared only about protecting the sisters she hadn’t seen in so many years. With her determination, it was only a matter of time before she learned everything, like Thora had said, all the family secrets. Elena couldn’t put off telling the truth any longer.

The older woman laughed, the sound of it forced and brittle. “Stupid little girl—”

“She’s telling the truth.” Elena defended her sister, as she should have defended them and their mother two decades ago. She should have insisted that Thora reunite the family she’d destroyed.

But in Thora’s mind, she’d done the right thing by having the children taken away from Myra Cooper. She’d insisted that they were better off away from their mother. She’d relished pointing out how Myra had given up her parental rights to Elena.

Elena swallowed hard, then revealed, “Before Ariel found me, I knew we were in danger.”

“How would you know that?” Thora asked, with more than annoyance in her blue eyes now, an almost indiscernible trace of fear, the same fear Kirk couldn’t quite hide whenever he looked at her. He had to know. He must have figured out exactly what he’d married.