“Gian left me alone for a year,” Majda whispered some time later, her sobs having left a rasp in her throat and her arms still around Elena. “I thought he’d moved on, but he hadn’t. And when I became with child, he was enraged, though I didn’t discover that until he had me captive. He beat one of the other Luminata so badly that it took him months to recover.”
“Hell.” All those angels were over a thousand years old, with the attendant healing powers, which meant Gian had turned someone into mincemeat. As he’d nearly done to Ibrahim. The angel remained in anshara under Laric’s watchful eye, the healer having chosen to stay in Lumia until Ibrahim was healed. He had the Cadre’s permission to continue on at Lumia afterward, but he’d decided to head for the Refuge and the Medica, where Keir had already offered him a position.
“I will be brave,” he’d told them using the silent tongue. “I will try. I do not want to become like the Luminata, so closed within myself that I cease to see the value of others.”
Elena intended to get in touch with Jessamy, give the other woman a heads-up that Laric might need a little of her gentle kindness and guidance. But today, her attention was on the woman who’d survived interminable horror.
“Gian didn’t come near me while I was pregnant,” her grandmother told her. “He was repulsed by the fact I carried Jean-Baptiste’s child. But two weeks after our baby was born, before we had settled our argument over her name—Jean-Baptiste wanted to call her Marguerite, while I preferred Taliyah—my husband disappeared.”
Majda pulled away, her face marked by tears but her eyes clear. “I searched for him, we all did, never thinking the angels would go so far as to hurt a vampire aligned to the Archangel Favashi—until Gian came to my parents’ home and made me an offer: that he would take care of me like a princess if I would be his mistress. I just had to leave my daughter behind.”
Hands fisting, she gritted out the next words. “He made it a point to say that my husband was no longer a problem. That was when I knew Gian had taken him. At the time, I believed Jean-Baptiste dead. And I knew my baby was another problem Gian would either eventually eliminate . . . or he’d abuse that babe. Simply because she was my husband’s child.”
Majda’s gaze was no longer broken; it held only fury. “Gian, he taunted us that he would have you. He called you my daughter.”
“The asshole isn’t taunting anyone now.”
A hard nod from her grandmother, this soft woman who nonetheless had a core of steel. “No, but back then, he held all the power.”
“So you ran.” Elena couldn’t imagine her fear and pain.
“I wasn’t yet fully recovered from the birth, but my parents urged me to go, gave me every last cent they had, did all they could to conceal my departure to give me time to get away.” Her body shook. “Gian told me later that he’d beaten them both when they wouldn’t tell him where I’d gone, left them so severely injured that they would’ve died if not for neighbors who nursed them back to health. He said it was a sign of his devotion.”
Elena’s grandmother looked like she wanted to spit. “I learned how to look after my beautiful Marguerite without my own mother nearby and my heart’s love presumed dead, managed to make a life for me and my baby in Paris, thought we were safe as she grew into a toddler who spoke so sweetly to me . . . then I saw an angel watching me one day.”
A chill of remembered fear drew the blood away from her face. “I thought I was being foolish, but still, in the depths of the night, I carried Marguerite out of our apartment and I hid in a place where I could watch that apartment. I told Marguerite it was a game.”
She smiled. “My baby was so good, played with her toys and never complained even when I realized I’d forgotten to pack her favorite snack. Even when I told her we couldn’t go back to our apartment because a bad angel was watching it. Instead, I took my child into a church where I knew the nun was kind.”
She rubbed a fist over her heart. “I kissed my azeeztee good-bye, and then I ran, my intent to lead the hunters as far from Marguerite as possible. They caught up to me in Turkey.”
Squeezing her eyes shut, Majda breathed in and out in a fast rhythm. “I escaped once from Lumia. That was when Gian chained me up underground. It was a horror to see Jean-Baptiste, see how Gian had been taking his jealous rage out on my husband, but seeing that he was alive, it also kept me strong.”
“Why is Jean-Baptiste still alive?”
“At first, it was so Gian could brutalize him for his own gratification. Later, it was because Gian wanted us to suffer—I by watching my husband being hurt, Jean-Baptiste by having to watch Gian . . .”
Anger scalded Elena’s veins at the words her grandmother didn’t say, the atrocities she didn’t enumerate. “You don’t have to tell me. I can guess.”
“When I thought I’d break,” her grandmother said instead, “I’d speak to my husband, and no matter how emaciated he became, or how much pain he was in, he’d tell me to think of our daughter growing in freedom, in the light. We knew Gian hadn’t found her—he would’ve never been able to keep that to himself. “
A soft hand cupping Elena’s cheek. “Now we will think of you. Daughter of our daughter.”
“My mother loved to dance,” Elena found herself saying just as Jean-Baptiste stepped out of the Tower doors, his hair shining golden. “When I was little, sometimes we’d dance in the rain and play in water pools.” It caused her pain to talk about Marguerite, but it was worth it to see the hungry joy in Majda’s eyes.