Chapter 3 Faith in Us #2
I knew how he felt. The first time she’d cried, I’d mapped each tear track, measured the duration between sobs, calculated the exact pressure needed to hold her without breaking her further…
“We need to tell her, Z,” Ko insisted. “About all of it. The packages, what happened to Rasputin, everything we’ve been keeping from her to ‘protect’ her.”
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Here we were, strategizing how to deliver truth in the least harmful way possible, when for years we’d been trained to use information as a weapon. Father would be disgusted by our hesitation. A show of weakness, he’d have called it.
But Seri had taught us something different, that sometimes, strength lay in gentleness. In considering someone else’s pain before your own objectives.
Maybe Father was changing now that he had Kaori. He was certainly trying to create some kind of relationship with us beyond employer and employees. I didn’t know whether to trust it or not, but Seri wanted us to try, so try we would.
Trying didn’t mean we would forgive him anytime soon, though, or that we would ever forget.
“She’s strong enough now to not need that kind of protecting anymore,” I said. “Support, yes, but as we’ve seen lately, she’s chafing under it.”
“Tomorrow, then,” Ko agreed.
“Tomorrow,” Zane echoed in a gloomy voice.
Yes, tomorrow, we’d break her heart.
Again.
“Now that the hard stuff’s over, let’s talk about even harder stuff.
” Z scrubbed his hands over his face. “Seri coming along on a hunt. I know I was against it to start with, but I changed my mind after full moon. Cruor, our girl is busting at the seams with power! I say we gear her up. I’ll even order her a pint-size helmet and tac gear. ”
“Zane—”
“I agree,” Koa interrupted me. “You just said she doesn’t need as much protection anymore.”
“I meant emotionally and mentally!” I growled, not liking that they’d allied on this. It was going to make me look like the villain to Seri again, and for once, just once, I wanted her to look at me like I was the hero!
#
I adjusted the folded handkerchiefs in my back pocket for the thirteenth time, wanting them to be easy to extract, yet not too obvious. Somewhere overhead, Zane balanced on a rolling ladder, muttering curses as he hid weapons in the classics section.
“Avoid Austen,” Koa reminded him, testing the give of sofa cushions. He’d rearranged the seating three times. Closer for comfort, farther for escape routes. “She always goes for the happy endings.”
“Zane.” I caught the throwing knife he hurled at Ko before the blade could strike the floor between our little brother’s feet. “Down. Now.”
“Relax, grandpa.” His boots hit the Persian rug with a thud, and he flourished a stun gun disguised as a flashlight. “Now which book should get extra spicy?”
The door creaked, and we froze like guilty teenagers.
Seri hovered in the threshold, all sleep-mussed curls and wide gray eyes darting between Koa’s sudden casual lean against the mantel, Zane’s death grip on War and Peace, and me still clutching the dagger.
“Oh. Am I in trouble?”
“Never.” Ko moved first.
“Unless you’ve been sexting the toaster,” Z blurted out. My elbow found his ribs with sniper accuracy, and he let out a soft, “Ow.”
We herded her to the sofa with the gentle urgency of bomb disposal experts. Brumous flopped across her feet, tail thumping. I counted her breaths between her heartbeats: Five before the shaking started.
“Is everything okay? You all look so serious.”
“Don’t let Cas’ funeral director expression fool you, sunshine.” Zane threw himself down beside her, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “Everything’s fine.”
“Funeral director?” I echoed, frowning.
“Yeah, you know.” Zane gestured vaguely at my face. “That whole ‘I regret to inform you’ expression you get when you’re about to deliver news.”
Ko sat on Seri’s other side, but I remained standing, although I consciously loosened my stance to appear less imposing, less ‘funeral director-ish.’
“We want to be clear about something right from the start,” I began.
Seri immediately tensed, fingers twisting in the fabric of her sundress.
After three months together, I’d cataloged every one of her microexpressions, and right now, her mind had gone straight to the same fear it usually did in these situations: We were done with her.
We were tired of her baggage. We were walking away…
“Okay, first?” Zane took point before my tongue could unstick from my soft palate. “We love you. Like, crazy cult-leader levels of devotion. And we’re keeping you forever, sweetheart. Just so you know. That’s, like, the non-negotiable baseline for this entire conversation.”
“What Z is trying to say,” Ko cut in, “is that nothing we’re about to discuss changes how we feel about you or our commitment to you, beloved.”
Brumous gave a soft whine, his muzzle against her ankle. The dire wolf was remarkably attuned to her moods, sensing shifts in her emotional state that even I sometimes missed despite my relentless study of the one I loved most.
“Okay.” Her shoulders slowly came down from her ears. “What is it, then?”
“Arabesque has sent things.”
Ko shot me a look, and I closed my eyes. Too blunt. Always too blunt. Damnation.
“Things?” Her fingers whitened as she strangled her skirt hem. “Dead things?”
“No, no. Items that belonged to your parents,” Ko told her quickly. “Things she kept from you. She’s been sending them here.”
She went very still.
“For how long?”
“About three weeks,” I admitted. “She orders Foster to bring them mostly. We’ve been checking them for curses or tracking spells while holding them for you.”
I watched her face, preparing for the spectrum of potential reactions I’d anticipated. Hurt. Betrayal. Anger at being kept in the dark. Instead, what bloomed across her features was something entirely unexpected: Disappointment. Not in us, but in herself.
“Oh.” Her eyes dropped to her hands. “She’s still trying to get to me, isn’t she? And you thought I couldn’t handle it.”
“That’s not—” I began, but she shook her head.
“No, I understand. I haven’t exactly been the picture of stability.” A bitter smile curved her lips. “Every time I think I’m stronger, that I’m finally free of her, something happens to prove how deep her hooks still go.”
This cut me more deeply than any anger directed at us would have. Motioning Brumous aside, I crouched down to her eye level.
“Seri, we didn’t keep this from you because we thought you were weak,” I assured her. “We kept it from you because we weren’t sure you were ready to hear it.”
“I am not going to break, Casimir.”
The use of my full name, not Simmy, signaled her displeasure more clearly than raising her voice ever could.
“No, but that doesn’t mean we need to hand you hammers. After everything she and her daughters did to you—”
“Remember when you were lying in bed, mentally torn apart, and I had to watch you suffer?” she interrupted. “When I spooned your morning coffee into your mouth because you couldn’t stop holding me?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Then you know exactly how it feels to be treated like a child, don’t you? To be so overprotected and cosseted, you feel like you can’t breathe.”
“Point to the little lady,” Zane smirked.
“What Cas is failing to explain,” Ko cleared his throat while giving me a pointed look, “is that we made decisions based on what we thought would protect you. But we’re learning that sometimes, protection isn’t what you need most. Try to understand, beloved.
We’re still learning how to be your partners, your husbands. ”
“Thank you for that.” She melted a little at his words. “That’s all I want, to be treated like a partner, not a project.”
“A partner who cries all over us,” Zane added with a fake shudder. “Just make sure to save some tears for my shirt later, snot pot!”
He gestured to today’s obscenity: “It’s not my middle finger. It’s my unicorn fist.”
Seri laughed, the sound more beautiful to me than she would ever know, then shook her head.
“I know you meant well. All of you. But I need you to trust that I can handle difficult things. I’ve been handling them for years.”
“In spectacularly bad ways, sometimes,” Zane smirked. “Remember when you tried to fight a monster crawfish with a stick?”
“It was all I had!”
“A stick,” Z continued deviling her. “You were going to swat it to death.”
“I thought hitting its antenna might confuse its sonar or something,” she mumbled, her cheeks turning pink.
“Crayfish don’t have sonar,” I informed her. “They rely on body hair to detect vibrations, although they are capable of making underwater sounds—”
“No one fucking cares, professor.” Zane rolled his eyes.
“What has she been sending?” Seri’s eyes brightened with curiosity. “You said my parents’ things?”
“Sometimes the ‘package’ is a rogue, sniffing around the estate’s perimeters,” Ko told her as I stood and moved to retrieve the items, “but the warded runestones hold.”
“Of course they do,” she said with pride. “You three activated them personally.”
Her faith in us sent a welcome warmth through me. She wasn’t wrong. The wards on those runestones had been activated with our blood and strengthened by our absolute commitment to keeping her safe within these walls.
“Foster intercepts anything truly dangerous or cursed before it ever reaches here,” Ko explained. “The rest are things you’d want, anyway.”
“Can I see them?”
“They might bring up difficult memories.”
“That only makes me more eager to see them.”
I recognized the set of her jaw, the quiet determination. The realization that we’d underestimated her again made me feel both proud and slightly foolish. With a nod, I placed the small collection on the coffee table before her.
She reached first for her father’s gold pocket watch, fingers tracing the inscription on the back.
“I thought this was lost. I have so few things connected to Mama.”