Chapter 41
River
Considering the evil organization threatening our very existence, I expected to be doing more than simply sitting around babysitting.
I should have been across the hall, in Jordan’s office, figuring out a plan with the rest of them—instead, the moment Laurie and I arrived at Leyore Headquarters, Jordan pressed a different mission into my reluctant hands: Twin duty.
Half an hour and a few gray hairs later, the spare office was already a wreck.
Crayons rolled under the conference table; an overturned filing cabinet served as a doll castle.
Hazel and Hilda were currently staging a war of their own, pelting each other with plushies while hotly debating whether vampires were cooler than shifters.
I ducked as a fluffy bat plushie was lobbed over my head. Jordan owed me big time for this one.
The redhead had begged and pleaded, and of course I buckled. Someone had to keep an eye on the twins. Jordan and Skye had their hands full doing damage control, and Ursula was caught up in helping the witches who were hurt in the attack last night.
Hunter and Addison had pleaded “terrible with children,” and Dylan vanished in a puff of smoky shadows when I tried to rope her in.
Poor Amara (the only vamp on the team with the slightest bit of integrity, in my opinion) was still getting used to her new vampire body and couldn’t stay in humanoid form for more than fifteen minutes without sprouting fangs and a new, inconvenient set of wings—and Maxine was busy faffing over Leah who looked very put out by yet another Leyore crisis dragging her away from work.
That left me, and by extension, the unexpected asset currently perched cross-legged on the carpet: Laurie, who, for once, seemed strangely content with skipping the action. I watched from the corner of the office with my feet propped up on the desk, stunned by the easy smile on her face.
She had laughed at Hazel’s ridiculous questions and praised Hilda’s crayon doodles, completely at ease in the presence of the two little monsters.
Where I expected her to be tense and guarded, she was relaxed and carefree.
This was a side of Laurie I had never seen before, and I sat quietly out of the way, unwilling to disrupt the endearing scene.
When the twins finally relented their plushie-slinging, Hazel sidled up to Laurie’s side and quizzed her about her opinion on finger painting, while Hilda entertained herself by drawing flowers on Laurie’s arm with a glittery gel pen.
Laurie indulged them both, delivering a solemn speech on the importance of finger painting and stretching her hand out for Hilda to trace swirling patterns over her palm.
It was somewhat surprising to find that Laurie was good with children, able to indulge their incessant chatter with the patience of a saint.
Her usual stoic grimace was nowhere to be seen, though the more I thought it over, the more it made sense.
This is what she could have been, had she not lost her own child.
This was a glimpse of the life that she’d been robbed of.
It was both beautiful and painful to witness.
After another straight hour of motor-mouthing, Hazel tired herself out mid-sentence and promptly curled up against Laurie’s leg.
Hilda was already conked out beside her sister, gel pen still fisted in her hand.
Laurie brushed stray bangs from Hazel’s forehead, her expression soft, almost wistful as she looked down at the twin tornadoes.
I swung my feet off the desk and walked over, crouching at her side and tugging a bit of plushie stuffing from Hilda’s hair. “You’re really good with them.”
Her smile faltered, eyes clouding over the way the sky dims before rain. “Yeah,” she murmured. “I… used to picture myself being a decent mom, I guess.”
“I can see it.” I eased down beside her, leaning back on my palms. “It's impressive—most people can’t go two minutes dealing with these two without blowing a gasket.”
That earned me a chuckle, and Laurie leaned over to run a soft hand through Hilda’s tufted hair again. “They’re not that bad. Just… way too much sugar in their system. What exactly is Jordan feeding these two?”
“Cereal, cereal, and more cereal. With an occasional secret candy bar thrown in the mix.” It was true, I’d seen the state of Jordan’s kitchen. Not a vegetable in sight.
“That’ll do it.” Laurie sighed, then fell silent for a beat. I could see her turning something over in her head, chewing on her lip like she was unsure if she wanted to speak or swallow her words.
I kept my voice gentle. “What’s spinning around in there?”
She shrugged, but her eyes were unusually glassy, pricked red in the corners like she was holding back tears. “I never got to see my kid at this age.” Her gaze fixed on the twins’ peaceful faces. “Dandelion died when she was just a year old.”
The words landed like a stone between us. Hilda snuffled, unaware of the heavy conversation happening over her head. Hazel drooled on Laurie’s thigh.
I shifted closer, brushing a shoulder up against hers. “Dandelion?”
Laurie’s smile was wistful. “They wouldn’t give her a real name…
so I came up with one myself. When she was born, her hair was fluffy and white—stuck out in every direction.
Like a dandelion puff.” A breathy exhale ghosted from her lips.
“I thought when we got out, maybe I'd call her Dannie for short. We’d be Dannie and Laurie, living like we were… normal.”
“Dandelion.” I rested my hand beside hers, stroking her knuckles with my thumb. “It’s cute.”
“She would’ve been around three by now,” Laurie went on, voice barely above a whisper.
“I keep trying to picture what color her eyes would’ve settled on, if her hair would have stayed white or darkened like mine, if her fangs would have grown in…
” She swallowed hard. “She was a hybrid, just like these two—but I guess you knew that part.”
Silence stretched out between us. Laurie examined the glitter flowers on her forearm.
“What happened?” The question left me before I considered the pain it might dig up. But I needed to know. I wanted to carry a part of that pain with her. She shouldn’t have to shoulder that burden alone.
Laurie’s expression shuttered, closing up in an instant, and I worried I’d pushed too far. Her aura writhed and coiled around her, a vivid chaos in stark contrast to her complete stillness. But then she sighed, a deep, anguished exhale, and tilted her head back to stare at the ceiling.
“I never thought I’d leave the facility.
I got so used to all the experiments and the pain and I…
I don’t know—I just kinda assumed that was all my life would ever be.
” She closed her eyes, fingers curling into fists.
“But when Dandelion was born, things changed—I changed. The moment I held her in my arms for the first time I knew I had to get her out. I couldn’t let her grow up in that place.
She’d be subjected to the same awful experiments I was.
” Her voice cracked, straining in her throat. “I didn’t want that for her.”
I held my tongue, listening intently with my eyes on her pained face as she continued.
“One day a fire broke out at the facility. I don’t know how it started, but it was pure chaos inside. I thought it was my chance, my one and only chance to get out, and I took it.” Laurie paused, brow crumpling at the painful memories.
I remembered her nightmares that crept into my head that first night she slept in my home—the smoke and fire, blaring alarms. The picture was coming into focus, and it wasn’t a pretty one.
“Everyone was distracted by the fire, so I snuck away—I went to find Dandelion.” Emotion rippled across Laurie’s features and she bowed her head.
“I grabbed her from the nursery, wrapped her up in a lab coat, and I ran. I was looking for the exit but everything was dark. There was so much smoke...” Her fists tightened, knuckles whitening.
“I ended up on my hands and knees, crawling. I kept her tucked under the coat, trying to shield her face.”
She glanced down at Hazel and Hilda, breath catching as she forced the words out. “My chest burned. I couldn’t get any air in. I was choking—I could feel my lungs shutting down.”
Laurie shuddered and I lifted a hand to her back, rubbing slow circles while she tensed and shivered under my touch. A painful ache was forming in my throat, my eyes pricking with tears as she laid the story out, one painful memory at a time.
“Then Arlon showed up.” Laurie’s laugh was brittle, bitter.
“He’d seen the fire, ran in to help—because of course he did.
He found me lying there in the dark, half-dead and suffocating, and carried me out.
I remember him shouting at me to breathe, and I did.
Then I realized… she wasn’t. Dandelion wasn’t breathing.
” Laurie jerked forward suddenly, shoulders caving in as she buried her face in her hands.
“Seconds, River. He was seconds too late.”
Her voice broke, raw and jagged like shattered glass. “By the time we made it out, she was gone.”
I caught her before she folded completely, arms winding tight around her trembling frame. Words felt useless—so I gave her silence and a steady presence, anchoring her to the here-and-now while her memories dragged her backward.
Laurie scrubbed at her eyes with furious knuckles, refusing to let the tears fall, but her aura radiated raw anguish—grief laced with a poisonous thread of survivor’s guilt. I understood the mingling emotions in her aura now. It all made a sad kind of sense.
In her head, the logic was painfully obvious. She fought for freedom, and she lost what was most precious to her because of it. Laurie wasn’t just hardened by loss and hardship, she was broken by guilt—it was a tool she used to torture herself with, long after she’d left the facility behind.
She folded over, forehead lowering to rest on my leg. Hazel and Hilda stirred at the slight disturbance, but kept on sleeping, both of them snuggled up against her side. I curled around Laurie, holding all four of us in a clustered heap, letting calm seep through our contact.
“Breathe with me,” I whispered, matching the rise and fall of her back until the shudders eased to tremors. But inside I was reckoning with a brutal truth. This kind of pain would not be easy to heal. It might not even be possible.
No comforting phrase could erase the hole left by a child’s final breath.
Laurie’s voice emerged, rough and ragged. “She died because I wanted out.”
“No.” I spoke softly but firmly, hunching over her and shrouding her body with my own. “You fought to save her—you did everything you could.”
“It wasn’t enough.” Her words trembled out. So quiet and yet so painfully potent.
I tightened my hold, but no counter-argument came.
Because she was right. Despite all her efforts and all her best intentions, nothing had been enough to stop her child’s lungs from filling with smoke—and I was filled with a sudden, paralyzing fear that I couldn’t promise my own efforts would be enough, either.
It was fear that I might someday echo her words. A fear that all of my efforts, all of my love for the woman in my arms, would not be enough to save her.