Page 16 of Blood from the Marrow (Lilith’s Legacy #2)
Chapter Twelve
Elena once believed she understood despair. Understood the concept of anguish. She thought she’d experienced both before when she’d been driven to the brink of a sadness so desperate, she would have traded anything to make it stop. Run anywhere to get away from it.
Alone in the shower, she remembered the vivid pain that had driven her to sneak aboard a ship bound for unknown lands. She didn’t need Zuri’s magic to take her back to the memories. In neither her first life nor her second had she been able to forget the taste of Catalina’s tear-stained lips.
On her skin, she could still feel the places where Catalina had clung to her.
She could still hear Catalina’s sobs when she told her she’d been promised to a man like a mare sold for breeding, still smell the burning wax from the chapel candles where Catalina promised they’d find a way to be together.
Promises that had turned to ash when Catalina was too afraid to run.
Elena’s throat burned when she held in the cry aching in her ribs. She gritted her teeth and choked it down. If she started now, there would be no stopping, and she wasn’t alone enough to fall apart.
No matter how hard Elena washed her skin in the scalding water, she couldn’t get clean. Couldn’t get rid of the rotting decay. She scrubbed harder. Scrubbed until she bled and healed and bled again. There was no erasing the narcotic taint consuming her skin.
All Elena could see was the corpse she should be.
The woman who would have been broken and tamed and born natural children and died.
The woman she would have been if she hadn’t cheated death.
She should be nothing but decomposed bones long returned to the earth.
Extending her life had paved a road of untold ruin.
With her forehead pressed to the shower glass, Elena accepted that she’d never known the complete absence of hope. The crush of abject failure and powerlessness.
She tried desperately to shut it all out. To break the surface of her drowning misery and take a single gasp of air. But the harder Elena resisted, the more it dragged her under. The shower’s steam turned to lead, shoving her to her knees when her body couldn’t bear the weight.
Hunched over on the hot tile, water pelting her back, Elena willed her senses to dull.
All she needed was a moment of not processing everything at once.
To shut out the sound of Librada’s unsteady heartbeat, still weak from blood loss despite Marisol’s healing.
To forget the horrific sound of Sofia’s throat being crushed. Forget the death that nearly followed.
Even in the shower, it was all pushing in on her. The reek of pain and fear saturating the air hurt more than Sayah’s fangs tearing her flesh.
She closed her eyes to make it stop, only to be assaulted by the vivid memory of Narine’s body lying lifeless. The wet sounds of her sons’ heads hitting marble.
Her cruel mind assaulted her with more loss.
She was back in a sprawling Havana mansion, holding her blood mother’s limp body in her arms. Francisca had been so cold.
So heavy in her pathetic arms. Elena had screamed until her throat was raw, begging her to wake up. To come back. Not to leave her alone.
Her heart lurched and the tears came in a violent rush that reminded her of vomiting over the side of a vessel crossing the Atlantic.
She’d never even gotten to hold Robert’s broken body, his white clothes soaked through with blood.
She’d led him straight to his death, too. So much death and it was all her fault.
Someone knocked at the door. The sound reverberated through Elena’s spine but she couldn’t move. Couldn’t answer. The scent of gardenias and smoke drifted under the door—Zuri. Her worry was a physical thing, pressing against Elena’s chest. Making it impossible to breathe even without her proximity.
“I hear you in there,” Zuri said loud enough to hear over the water. Elena imagined her hand pressed to the door. Imagined the concern etched into every part of her heartbreaking face. “Let me in.”
Elena’s throat closed. How long before Zuri or Marisol paid the steep price of loving her?
The memory of Sayah’s cruel laugh echoed in her head.
The sound of Narine’s neck snapping. The gurgle of blood in her throat.
Elena pressed her palms to her ears, but she couldn’t shut it out.
Couldn’t stop seeing Marisol’s wings spread wide, putting herself between death and Elena’s daughters.
Beautiful. Fierce. So fucking breakable.
Despite the cascading water and pounding on the door, all Elena could hear were the death rattles of everyone who’d ever trusted her to keep them safe. She’d lived so many lives, taken so many souls, but she’d never managed to save a single person who mattered.
Were they safe enough in the condo? Should she buy the entire building? Everything made her exposed. She couldn’t think of a single place that wouldn’t carry her taint. That wouldn’t subject the people she loved to her violence.
“Elena,” Marisol’s voice was so low. So gentle. Even now—after she’d seen what vampires really were, what they’d always be, death where she was life—Marisol was worried about her. “Please let us in. We just want to make sure you’re okay.”
Even Marisol’s distress was sweet, so centered on everyone else. She was the only reason Librada and Sofia were recovering in the guest quarters. The only reason for Sayah’s retreat.
Elena curled tighter into herself, forehead pressed to her knees. She couldn’t stop seeing Marisol and Zuri, lifeless and mangled on the floor. It felt more like providence than fear. It’s where they would end and Elena couldn’t do anything to stop it. She couldn’t do her one job and protect them.
Would Sayah accept her surrender? Could she believe Elena if she bent to her authority?
Elena’s stomach heaved. No vampire power hungry enough to make a move like Sayah did would risk letting Elena live. Elena sure as fuck wouldn’t leave her alive if she got a chance to end this.
It wasn’t death Elena feared. She couldn’t tolerate leaving Zuri and Marisol to Sayah’s clutches. And what of Sofia and Librada and the rest of Elena’s inner circle? They’d all be targeted no matter what path Elena chose.
Another knock. “I’ll kick this fucking door down,” Zuri warned, but her voice cracked on the last word. “Don’t think I won’t.”
They could hide, she thought. Her mind reeled, taking her back to the place she’d felt safest. Zuri’s farm.
The moment she conjured it, a sob racked her chest. Sayah and her minions breaking through the wards.
She smelled blood sinking into soil. Heard screams bouncing against glass.
Bile rose in her throat even as her fangs extended to take on the phantoms tormenting her.
There was nowhere to go. Nothing Elena could do keep from bringing death with her anywhere she went. To keep it from trailing her like a shadow.