Chapter 15
Electra
BOOGIE BOO: Text me when you get home. Just want to know that you’re safe.
BOOGIE BOO: PS: I’m sorry for acting like a duck.
My lips quirk.
BOOGIE BOO: Duck not duck.
BOOGIE BOO: DICK not duck.
I’m full-on grinning now.
BOOGIE BOO: Are you home?
A couple of days ago, I considered Cillian awkward and innocent, a tepid breeze. Turns out he’s anything but. He’s layered and unexpected, a whole weather system complete with warm surges, cold fronts, and flashes of dangerous lightning.
ME: Almost. You?
BOOGIE BOO: Almost?
BOOGIE BOO: How far do you live?
ME: I stopped by a friend’s house.
No dots dance on the screen. I’m guessing he’s sitting with my answer, wondering which friend, hoping I’ll type out Calanthe’s name.
ME: Mom wants to meet you.
ME: Are you free tomorrow?
BOOGIE BOO: What time?
I can’t decide if his lack of hesitation is sweet or alarming.
ME: Don’t you want to know why she wants to meet you?
BOOGIE BOO: I’m guessing it’s because she thinks we’re dating.
ME: We’re not dating.
Dots appear but never transform into words. I wish they would. I’m guessing—judging by Cillian’s adamance—that he was hammering out messages insisting I’m wrong.
BOOGIE BOO: My morning’s wide open.
ME: Mine’s not. What does your afternoon look like?
BOOGIE BOO: Is 9 pm too late?
Nine? I realize he relies on his job for money and that I can’t ask him to cancel classes for me, but does he really not have a break until nine o’clock?
ME: How about an early breakfast, actually?
BOOGIE BOO: Breakfast it is.
I shut down my chat, open a webpage, and type: Gael Monta. I proceed to study every picture of the man who made me, trying to spot a resemblance. I decide the frame of our faces, our olive skin tone, and the blueness of our eyes—or eye, in my case—are rather similar.
I look up my brother next. My likeness to him is even more striking as he sports the same haircut as I do. It makes me want to grow my hair down to my waist or trim it even shorter.
I wonder if I’m seeing all these similarities because I’m looking for them or if they’re truly there.
A message notification appears at the top of my phone.
BOOGIE BOO: Where are we doing breakfast?
ME: Come over to mine.
I graze the send button just as Malachi enters my building’s underground lot, severing my internet connection. I call my private elevator and scan my fingerprint to unlock the button marked “PH”. The glowing button blurs as we shoot past the lobby and up to the top of my tower.
Ines and Dorian are still upstairs when we arrive. Still tense. Almost tenser than Mom. While she and Malachi disappear inside the living room with Ines, I stay back with Dorian.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” I ask him.
Dorian’s cheeks hollow and puff, pinkened by his frantic pacing. Or perhaps it’s his panic that’s at the root of his flush. “Monta’s a lowli—”
“He’s my father.”
“No, Dad is your father. Monta is—”
“My.” I punch out the word. “Biological,” I spit out. “Father.”
“He’s not. He’s a pompous piece of…”—instead of the word shit, my curse-adverse brother grunts—“that couldn’t keep it in his pants.”
“Maybe, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s the reason I exist.” I haul in air. “I wish you’d told me, Dee.”
“So you could’ve sought him out?” Dorian’s giant body shakes with uncontrolled fury. I haven’t seen him this panicked since Tarian was taken. “So he could’ve stolen you from us?”
That tears a hole in the sails of my frustration. “I wouldn’t have gone with him.”
“Back then, the Council was full of people who would’ve ruled against our family out of spite.” The fight has roughened my brother’s timbre and mottled his complexion.
“Tarian would’ve interceded.”
“He would’ve needed a reason, and ‘irresponsible dirtbag’ isn’t an actionable offense.”
“Ines was married to him. So he couldn’t have been that bad, right? I mean, I’m not a fan of her, but you are.”
“She was eighteen and na?ve. Fell head over heels for Monta. It wasn’t until he commissioned an oil portrait of himself holding the severed head of Caruso’s first lieutenant that she finally grasped just how disturbed he was.
Sorry—a sporting portrait.” Dorian’s nose wrinkles.
“I heard he had Dominic Caruso’s head, as well as the man’s late wife’s, added to the painting after he killed them. ”
I wrinkle my nose. How vile. The Holy Hunters may vie for our destruction, but posing with their severed limbs is next-level. I don’t even care that he single-handedly managed to knock three Holy Hunters off the top of the pyramid.
Dorian links his strong arms around me and pulls me in for a bone-crushing hug. “I’m sorry, Elle.” He kisses the top of my head. “We should’ve sat you down when you were eighteen and told you everything.”
I wish they had, but there’s no point regretting since the past can’t be changed, not even with magic.
“I don’t want Ines or Mal to be there tomorrow.” I pull away and look up into my brother’s emotion-ravaged face. “Only you and Mom.”
He nods.
“Dorian, can you stop worrying? It’s going to be fine. I’m a big girl.”
His mouth purses, and I realize that in his eyes—like in Malachi’s—I will always be the ten-year-old with track marks they rescued from a ramshackle apartment.
“Anything else I should know about the man who made me?”
“He’s a smooth-talking weasel.”
“You really don’t like him, do you?”
“The man only cares about himself.”
“Narcissistic pervert.” Ines’s voice resonates through the kitchen.
“That’s the clinical term for what he is.
” She zips up her leather jacket, features harder than I’ve ever seen them.
Eyes darker, too. She looks terrible. “He’ll lure you in with pretty words.
And then he’ll demolish you piece by piece to make himself pass as a savior when he affords you a crumb of affection. ”
My eyes spasm. “I know what a narcissistic pervert is, Ines.”
“Yet you’ve agreed to meet him,” she says as she walks toward my front door.
She pauses there, with her fingers wrapped around the handle. Is she waiting for Malachi to join her, or for me to change my mind?
If it’s the latter, she’ll be dangling off my door all night since I intend to see this meeting through. I might not be looking for a parent, but I wouldn’t mind closure.
Besides, what if she made up Gael’s despicable character to fit her shitty-husband narrative?
I’m showered and dressed by the time Mom informs me that Gael Monta’s chauffeured SUV has pulled up in front of my building.
I surprisingly slept well. Unlike my poor mother, whose eyes are rimmed with fatigue. And not from dusting and rearranging every decorative object on the built-in living room shelves, or from stocking my kitchen with an absurd amount of groceries.
“How did you have nothing edible in your fridge?” she asks, grabbing a carton of oat milk and splashing some over her espresso.
“Because I don’t like leftovers and I don’t cook.”
My answer seems to dash against her skull as she glares at the front door.
“I could feed a small army.” When Mom keeps glowering at the entrance of my house, I can’t help but chirp, “Refrain from committing Montacide until I get some chat time, okay?”
She grunts before saying. “Your real father’s on his way.”
Surprise puckers my forehead. “Really?”
“Too much excitement across the pond for him to sit still on his rock. He told me he wrote you.”
A corner of my mouth lifts as I picture my father depleting his magic to propel the jet flying him over the Atlantic. “Forgot to plug in my phone. It’s charging now. Is Dad staying until breakfast tomorrow? I arranged for Cillian to come over then.”
“If it’s not overwhelming, I’m sure he’d love to meet your boyfriend.”
“Not my boy—”
“But if you think it’s too much, your father can go hunker down at Dorian’s.”
I don’t have time to answer, because the door has just clicked.
Mom’s worried eyes bounce back to me. “Why don’t you come home with us tomorrow?”
I don’t have time to give her an answer before I hear two sets of footsteps thump against the hardwood floors. My biological father walks ahead of Dorian, his blue eyes laser-focused on what he can see of me beyond the kitchen island.
“My beautiful daughter,” Gael murmurs, seemingly awestruck. Perhaps he is. After all, he made me.
If he truly is a narcissistic pervert, then he’ll find no flaw in his creation. Right?
Mom sets down her mug and reaches for my hand, body language screaming mine. “Good morning, Gael.”
“It is, ain’t it, Malika? A most wonderful start to my day.” He never once looks away from me as he unzips his camel suede jacket, revealing a white V-neck beneath. “I wanted to bring Alexander, but Dorian insisted it be just the two of us. Well, the four of us.”
The doorbell chimes.
“Five,” Mom says. “Electra’s father wanted to be present as well.”
Oh, Mom… My chest warms at her possessiveness.
“Dad was still an hour away when I spoke to him last,” Dorian says.
A chill seizes my chest as I realize who it must be—Ines.
She just couldn’t help herself from…
Mom draws the door wide. My caller isn’t platinum-haired and brown-skinned; he’s bespectacled and as white as can be.