Chapter 23 #2
Tears threatened but she fought them back, for Gavriel, son of Michaela, grandson of Gavriel past, would not wish to meet the stranger that she had become to him while she was awash in emotion that he couldn’t reciprocate.
He might never love her.
So be it.
He lived. He breathed. He was respected enough to be in the inner court of an archangel.
Her son was a glory.
So it was that when he landed on the roof, she was able to look at him with dry eyes despite the tumult in her heart.
He had skin the same mocha shade as hers and wings identical to her own, his mahogany-colored hair holding loose curls.
His jawline was as perfect as his father’s, and his eyes a tawny shade of brown intermixed with gold that gave him the look of a jungle cat.
Her stomach tightened. For those striking eyes were his father’s, too.
Her initial instinct had been to execute her lover, so that he could never challenge her for her child’s love, but then she’d decided that there was no need.
He was a frippery, pretty and vacuous, and nothing worthy of the son he’d helped create.
He didn’t even know that he’d managed to sire a babe on an archangel… but at least he was alive.
Gavriel would never look upon her as the executioner of his blood father. And should he ever wish to meet that father, she would give him the man’s name and he could track him down to whichever pleasure den the pretty frippery currently called home.
How extraordinary that this man who was respected both as a warrior and a scholar—she’d heard it in Andreas’s voice, in Illium’s—would come from her with her vanity and her cruelty and her petty intrigues, and that shallow and vapid angelic courtier whose primary interest was himself?
“Well met, Gavriel.” Her throat ached with the effort it took to keep her emotions in check. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.”
“Archangel Michaela,” he said with a respectful bow, and it made her flinch inside, for that was not how she would have him greet her…but he was a man, and she must do as Keir had advised and treat him as a man.
“I admit I had my doubts about the soundness of the idea,” he said in a voice resonant and even. “But I have friends who will never get to meet their mothers again, and they advised me that such a chance was not one I should squander.”
“Wise friends,” Michaela said, grateful to those unknown strangers.
Gavriel stared at her with an intensity that would’ve been an insult in any other circumstance.
“I see pieces of myself in you,” he said at long last, a hitch in his voice.
“I have never seen pieces of myself in another before.” The merest hint of a smile.
“Though I suppose it is the other way around, isn’t it?
My skin, my hair, the shape of my eyes, they are pieces of you. ”
Oh, what she would do to have him smile at her again. “Yes,” she said, careful to keep her tone light. “I believe this I can claim as my right.”
Gavriel inclined his head in silent agreement, the sky behind him a smudged dark blue as the sun faded wholly from the day.
“Will you share a meal with me,” she said, “and tell me of…Well, tell me of whatever you desire. My only wish is to spend time with you and to let you know that if ever you have need of me, I am here.” She hungered to drench him with her love, but he wouldn’t accept it, not this calm and strong man her son had become in her absence.
He was…better for her absence.
It hurt her to acknowledge that, but it was the truth and she could not hide from that.
He’d grown up under the wing of a healer, not surrounded by power and corruption and the vicious games of her court.
Oh, she would’ve never consciously harmed him, would’ve loved him to the last drop of her being, but he would’ve developed in a far more corrosive atmosphere.
“I would be pleased to share a meal with you—and I would stay here for a day or two if it would suit,” he said, yet formal with her. “I am…curious about my origins.”
Her chest compressed, and she knew her reckoning was to come sooner than she’d imagined, but she would not be Aegaeon, would not alienate her child.
“If you would not take it as too much familiarity,” Gavriel continued, “I would thank you.”
Michaela asked the question with a tilt of the head.
“For placing me under Father’s care. You could have chosen no better guardian.”
It was no shock to hear him refer to Keir as his father—the healer had already spoken to her of this. “It would have been a cruelty to both of us to tell him not to call me thus.” Keir had pressed a fist to his chest. “He is the son of my heart, and I am his father in all but blood.”
Tears in the healer’s voice as he’d added, “He’s my boy, Michaela. That doesn’t mean he can’t be yours, too. A child—even a full-grown one—can never know too much love.”
And that, she’d thought with tears of her own, was why she had chosen Keir as she lay dying, her blood bubbling in her throat.
“In that moment in battle,” she said today, her voice uneven, “I knew I trusted Keir more than any other when it came to you.” Odd, but she’d trusted Raphael’s consort, too, to ensure Gavriel got to Keir.
“It does my heart good to hear your love for him in your voice. It was my one wish, that you grow up cherished and beloved.”
Gavriel’s expression was difficult to read…but then he offered her a slight smile. “I was well loved—and by more than Keir. Jessamy and Galen kept me many a night when Father had to work on patients.”
Her entire being ached, braced for a blow. “The librarian was as a mother to you?”
“Yes.”
The blow hit. Hard.
“But,” Gavriel added, “she would not allow me to call her Mother, because she said that was not her place. It was yours. To me, Jessamy is Eh-ma, even if that isn’t quite the correct term.”
Her chest expanded on a new breath. “Aodhan calls Lady Sharine Eh-ma. I have heard him do so. It is a title of honor.”
“Yes. My Eh-ma is as important to me as Lady Sharine is to Aodhan.”
Michaela nodded, hearing far more than what he was saying. Her son had a family—she was on notice that his loyalty was theirs. “I loved the babe I left behind,” she said, her throat raw. “I wanted all the world for him. I am glad he was raised by people who gave him that world.”
Gavriel took her in for long moments. “You are not who I was expecting.”
Michaela’s stomach clenched at the proof that this warrior-scholar had researched her. “I am altered by my fall.” She paused. “Would you know me?”
A pause before he took a step toward her, then another. Until they were close enough that her son—taller than her by several inches—crooked an arm and said, “May I escort you to dinner?”
As she touched her son for the first time, accepting his offer, Michaela could not hold back her tears. Swallowing hard to speak past them, she said, “Ask me any question you want, Gavriel. I will answer.” Even if it painted her in a bad light.
Because he was her son, and he was the only reason she was in this world.