Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
After much heated debate between Luis, Milo, their parents, Dahlia, and Felix — who’d been both exactly like and nothing close to what she’d imagined — it was determined that removing the target of Malachi’s current ire was the best option.
Malachi would be handled, according to a wild-eyed Felix, but the only surefire way to permanently end the threat to Francesca specifically was to “get on with it.” At which point in the conversation everyone had looked pointedly at Luis.
He hadn’t been happy. Luis argued his case with his family for well over an hour, demanding the chance to end Malachi himself, but Felix refused him again and again.
“He thinks he can get away with targeting you,” Felix had explained.
“He thinks we don’t care enough to defend our own.
That’s his oversight, and that’s where we’ll get him.
But right now the interest in Frankie is way too fuckin’ high across the board.
I’m sending you both away. End of discussion. ”
Within the hour, she and her sour-faced vampire were told to wait on their ride. Despite how upset Luis was, she couldn’t have been more relieved.
She didn’t want him to fight any more than he already had.
Luis was already covered in bruises, stitched cuts, and had been stabbed.
The thought of waiting with his family while he hunted down that awful man made her stomach churn.
As much as she disliked the idea of being sent into isolation with absolutely nothing to do, it was by far preferable to that.
Francesca had anticipated a car or perhaps a place to take them south to the beach property they were expected to hide away in. What she got was very much not that.
Genevieve Carver, otherwise known as Ginny, was a small woman. A few inches shorter than Francesca, with long brown hair, a dusky complexion, and copious tattoos, she was undeniably beautiful and equally troubled.
She’d been called by Felix to Luis’s parents’ house, though Francesca hadn’t initially understood why.
No one seemed inclined to stop and explain much of what was going on to her, but truthfully she didn’t need it.
Her brain had been thoroughly overloaded by the drama and violence of the last few days.
She doubted she could’ve handled much of anything more, even if it was only a passing introduction.
But it turned out to not be necessary, anyway. Genevieve’s role in the Amauri family became abundantly clear when every window and door in the front of the house rattled with an explosion of light and power — the result of a magical gate opening and closing suddenly on the stoop.
Genevieve was a gatekeeper. The most powerful caliber of witch who could tear open the fabric of time and space at will. Immensely valuable and vanishingly rare, a syndicate family having one on their payroll must’ve been an incredible advantage.
Things had been a whirlwind after Genevieve and her bodyguard’s entrance.
Francesca had barely gotten a good look at the witch and her towering, furious-looking bodyguard before Luis was tying their wrists together again.
She’d gone beet red when he did it in front of his whole family, who watched with their eyebrows raised, but he didn’t seem to care what they thought.
“You don’t leave my side,” he’d growled. “Even in an m-gate.”
Never had Francesca even dreamed she’d travel by m-gate. That was for witches and those few so privileged they could afford to pay them. She, like most arrants, used m-lev trains, jets, and cars to get around the continent.
It was exactly as awful as she’d believed it to be.
Going through an m-gate was a bit like being taken apart molecule by molecule, spat through a straw, and reassembled on the other side. She was a little shocked to find everything in its proper place when they materialized in the scrubby, coastal garden of a beach house.
Luis tugged her close. Setting their bags on the pebbled path, he took a moment to cup her cheeks. “Are you okay?”
Francesca blinked flickering lights out of her eyes and wiggled her toes to check that they were all present and accounted for. Somewhere not too far away, waves crashed on a darkened beach, and the scent of salt and green things gave the air the taste of life.
“Fine,” she mumbled. “Where are we?”
“Isabelle’s beach house,” Genevieve answered, nearly drawing a scream of surprise out of Francesca.
Craning her neck to look at the witch and her bodyguard, she said, “I didn’t realize you two were coming with us.”
“We’re not,” the witch replied. Her delicate brows were drawn tightly together, and there was an ashen quality to her warm skin. Despite the immense power that she carried within her, she looked terribly delicate beneath the layer of her baggy sweater.
The witch looked at Luis. “I want to talk to you.”
“You two should stay here,” he argued. “This isn’t your fight, Ginny.”
“Agreed,” the bodyguard, who Francesca vaguely recalled as being introduced as Nash, grunted.
As big as a building, sporting the Amauri white stripe — with the fun addition of a completely white eyebrow — and wearing an expression that made her want to take a precautionary step back, he was the picture of a fearsome guard.
“Felix didn’t say I have to hide,” Genevieve protested. “I need to know what’s happening, Luis. I can’t be in the dark.”
Luis let out a frustrated sigh. Tossing his head toward the house, he ordered, “Let’s get inside.”
They all followed dutifully after him as he disengaged the security perimeter and unlocked the front door.
The home was dark but well-maintained inside.
The walls were painted a soft cream and all the light fixtures were fitted with hand-blown glass bulbs that looked like they’d come straight out of the ocean.
Leaving their suitcases in the hallway for a moment, Luis led them into a cozy living room with a pair of yellow couches, a driftwood coffee table, and towering, built-in bookshelves framing a large television. Large glass doors led to a dreamy backyard full of scrubby plants.
Francesca loved it immediately, far more than she’d ever liked the penthouse or even his parents’ mansion, but she didn’t have much time to admire the details.
Dropping onto the couch beside Luis, she pressed herself to his side and was relieved when he immediately took hold of her thigh, like he wanted to anchor her to him as much as she wanted to be anchored.
The witch sat down across from them, but her bodyguard didn’t. He took up a post behind her, his massive hands clutching the back of the couch on either side of her shoulders – almost like he wished to make a shelter out of his body for the woman who stared at them with such haunted eyes.
“He knows I’m an Amauri now,” she said. It wasn’t a question, but there was an edge to it that was almost desperately hopeful. Like a part of her believed Luis would tell her no.
Unfortunately, Luis looked even more exhausted and frustrated than before. “We don’t know that. Not for certain.”
Trying to put all the pieces together, Francesca asked, “We’re talking about Malachi, right?”
“Yes,” Luis answered, fingers gently squeezing her thigh. “He was Ginny’s former… employer, I guess. He made a comment at the Games that sounded like he might know she’s with us.”
“He held her captive for years,” Nash snapped. “And branded her like cattle.”
Francesca’s horrified gaze snapped to Genevieve, who was staring hard at the coffee table. One tattooed hand moved the sagging side of her baggy sweater higher up on her shoulder, but not before Francesca glimpsed the sinuous body of a tattooed snake draped over her collar bones.
“My father gave me to him to pay his debt. When he died, I thought I could be free. I took a chance and went to the Amauris, thinking they were the only family he wouldn’t mess with,” Genevieve explained in a flat voice. Her shoulders curled a little. “I guess I was wrong.”
Nash looked down at the witch. His expression shifted from outraged to tortured in a heartbeat. He slowly lifted his hands from the couch to place them on her shoulders, as if he wasn’t sure he should.
In a gruff voice, he promised, “You’re safe, Ginny. I won’t let anything happen to you. Ever.”
Genevieve glanced up at him, then at Luis and Francesca, before landing back on Nash again.
There was something wild in her eyes when she exclaimed, “It’s not me I’m worried about!
You have no idea what kind of things Malachi is capable of.
He uses people to get whatever it is he wants.
I’m not just talking about blackmail and debts. I’m talking lives, Nash.”
In a hoarse whisper, she added, “Now he knows there are people he can use against me.”
“Right now, all we know for a fact is that he wants Frankie,” Luis argued. “He shot at me, not Nash. He tried to kidnap Frankie, not you. He’s a greedy prick who had his ego bruised.”
“But he knows,” she insisted, fingers curling tightly into the sleeves of her sweater.
Luis shook his head. “Let’s say he does. Why hasn’t he acted, then? If he wanted you back so bad, why not go after any of us before now?”
“The smartest thing to do right now is lay low,” Nash insisted. “Let me take you away for a while. If he does know you’re with us, then we get out of his orbit. If he doesn’t, then no harm done. We can go north. I know you’ve wanted to get back to the snow. I’ll get us a cabin—”
“And what if someone’s hurt?” She vigorously shook her head. “I need to be here in case of emergencies, Nash. I can’t run away. Not again.”
The witch stood up suddenly. Her ashen face was set in hard lines when she announced, “We should get back. I don’t want to miss anything.”
Nash looked pained. He reached for her arm but dropped his hand a mere inch from catching her sleeve. “Gin…”
It was only at that moment that Francesca remembered what Marietta had said in the penthouse. They aren’t together, she realized, lips parting with astonishment.
It wouldn’t have seemed strange except for the fact that Nash was so clearly, visibly, achingly in love with Genevieve, who at least on the surface didn’t appear to notice.
The witch curled her arms around herself and offered a wan smile to her bodyguard. “We’ve got this, right?”
Nash’s throat moved with an audible swallow. “Of course,” he answered in that gruff voice.
The pair shared a long look before they made their goodbyes. Francesca waited until the windows stopped rattling from the explosive power of the m-gate before she turned to Luis. “Does she know?”
Grabbing her hand, he gently pulled her up from the couch. “That Nash is in love with her? I don’t think so.”
She let him guide her back to the entryway to pick up their bags. “I feel awful,” she admitted, unable to banish the image of Genevieve’s pale face from her mind. “Not only did I put you in danger, but now she is, too.”
Hefting their bags, Luis ordered her, “Don’t, Frankie. It was always going to happen. We’ve had guards on Ginny from day one exactly for this reason. If it wasn’t him, it’d be someone else trying to take her.”