found me.” By accident. She’d actually been looking for Thora, to confront the person who’d sworn out the complaint that had separated their family. Elena would make certain that meeting never happened. She didn’t want her grandmother treating Ariel the way she’d treated Elena, with resentment and bitterness at their mother.
“If she’s talking to you now, it’s only because she doesn’t know everything. Yet.” Thora shook her head, as if she pitied Elena, but a small, satisfied smile played around her mouth. “Maybe I should enlighten her.”
“No.” Ariel deserved to know the truth, but Elena was the one who needed to tell her. Not Thora. Twenty years ago Elena hadn’t been able to protect her sisters from Thora’s manipulations, but now she was older and wiser. She wouldn’t let Thora hurt them again.
The older woman threatened, “I will tell her some interesting family secrets, if you don’t drop this now. If you don’t stay away from them.”
“She is my family. I have a right to speak to her. And Irina.” Again the vision flashed into her mind, in a bright beam of light, the woman trapped in the middle of the flames. Instead of cigars, Elena caught the odor of wood smoke; it burned in her nostrils, the image was so real. “I need to find Irina.”
Thora’s blue eyes flickered, the first sign of genuine annoyance. “Those women are nothing to you anymore. They never were. Accept that.”
Frustration clutched at Elena’s throat, making it hard for her to draw a breath. She wanted to scream, to throw things. But she restrained all those urges. She’d learned well how to control herself the past twenty years. She could restrain her passion and her temper—but not the visions. She’d never learned how to control her ability, only how to deny it.
Thora sighed. “I can’t believe how ungrateful you are. I saved you from that life, from that hand- to-mouth existence and brought you here, to live in luxury, with a father who loved you.”
She never claimed to love Elena though. If not for how devoted she’d been to her son, Elena would have thought Thora incapable of love. But was that obsessive devotion to Elijah, like when she’d deliberately broken up Elena’s family, really love or something darker?
As dark as the man who lurked in the shadows of Elena’s visions, his face obscured but his intentions clear?
She ignored her grandmother’s diatribe. She had come to reason with Thora, not argue. “Ariel found me because we’re in danger. We need to find Irina, to warn her, too.”
Thora shook her head as her thin lips twisted with disgust. “I thought you were smarter than that. How much money did Ariel want for this information? How much were you foolish enough to pay her?”
“She doesn’t want my money.”
Ariel was probably one of the few people to whom wealth meant nothing. She cared only about protecting the sisters she hadn’t seen in so many years. With her determination, it was only a matter of time before she learned everything, like Thora had said, all the family secrets. Elena couldn’t put off telling the truth any longer.
The older woman laughed, the sound of it forced and brittle. “Stupid little girl—”
“She’s telling the truth.” Elena defended her sister, as she should have defended them and their mother two decades ago. She should have insisted that Thora reunite the family she’d destroyed.
But in Thora’s mind, she’d done the right thing by having the children taken away from Myra Cooper. She’d insisted that they were better off away from their mother. She’d relished pointing out how Myra had given up her parental rights to Elena.
Elena swallowed hard, then revealed, “Before Ariel found me, I knew we were in danger.”
“How would you know that?” Thora asked, with more than annoyance in her blue eyes now, an almost indiscernible trace of fear, the same fear Kirk couldn’t quite hide whenever he looked at her. He had to know. He must have figured out exactly what he’d married.
Elena drew in a deep breath. Maybe it was better, for all of them, that they knew. She couldn’t deny the visions any longer, not to herself or anyone else. “I just know.”
“You’re talking that crazy stuff again.” The older woman stood up now and thumped a fist on her desk, scattering papers across the surface as the picture frames rattled. “You will not bring that witchcraft into my home. Do you understand me?”
Elena flashed back, not to a vision or a dream, but to a memory two decades old. The first time she’d told her grandmother of a vision she’d been subjected to a similar tirade. Then she’d been sent to counseling and therapy and prescribed drugs to treat her “disorder.” The doctors and therapists had claimed it was everything from separation anxiety to post-traumatic stress, blaming everything on her mother, like Thora always did. She hated that her son had fallen in love with Myra Cooper.
“I understand you,” Elena said, knowing that the hatred had consumed whatever decency her grandmother might have had. Elena would get no help, from Thora Jones, in locating Irina. “You’ve never understood me. So let me go—”
“Go, get the hell out of here, if that’s the way you want it,” Thora said, shaking with rage. She picked up one of the framed photos from her desk and turned the picture toward Elena. From her grandfather’s arms, a little blond girl smiled sweetly at them. “But she stays.”
Elena’s heart clenched with love and fear. “You can’t take away my daughter.”
“Funny, I think that’s exactly what your mother told me.”
Her grandmother’s laughter echoed in her ears, as Elena rushed out of her rooms. She slammed the door to the corridor, then sagged against it, squeezing her eyes shut on the image of Thora’s hateful face. Every confrontation with her grandmother left Elena this way, weak, shaking…with a little less of her soul.
“Are you all right?”
She opened her eyes, confronting Joseph’s concerned gaze again. “You stayed.”
He nodded, those deep green eyes soft again with sympathy. “Things never go well between you and your grandmother.”
“So you thought what?” She lifted a brow, relieved to feel anger, which made her so much stronger than fear. “That I might need you?”
Haughty, scornful—she’d rather Joseph see her that way than weak. Like Thora, he wouldn’t respect weakness. But why did she want his respect? He was too much like her grandmother. That was why he’d been given the job that by birthright should have been hers. But refusing to hire her had been more favor than punishment for Elena. If she’d worked for Thora, she might have begun to act like her as well, and she never wanted to become that hateful, bitter and unscrupulous.
“I tend to forget that you hate me,” he said, his wide mouth quirking into a wicked grin.
So did she. That scared her nearly as much as her grandmother’s threats, which weren’t empty. She had enough money and power to get whatever she wanted. Not
