Page 36 of Blood from the Marrow (Lilith’s Legacy #2)

Chapter Twenty-Five

Ghosts may not be lingering around The Order’s grounds, but they sure felt like they were following Elena around her Venetian home.

While Zuri and Marisol slept into the afternoon, Elena drifted through the halls.

Room after room seemed to mock her with their covered furniture.

To ridicule her with an emptiness material things couldn’t fill.

She hadn’t planned on going back to the drawing room. Hadn’t thought about the painting of Cleopatra until she pulled its dusty cover off and sat in the armchair across from it.

Rendered in oil, Cleopatra and her lover were both lying sideways on a chaise lounge and facing their audience of one.

The red velvet fabric was so rich in the painting.

The lover’s desire was subtle; slightly parted lips and half-lidded eyes and her head tipped to the side to expose her neck.

Behind her, Cleopatra’s hunger was unmistakable.

Mouth open and fangs exposed, she looked directly at Elena as if asking how she should ravage the woman’s skin.

Asking how deeply she should drink when she finally sliced into her carotid and filled her mouth with fresh blood.

The artist—a human lover Francisca had taken when they’d returned to Spain for a spring after a particularly lucrative sugar cane harvest—had been fascinated by their kind.

She’d wanted to learn every drop of legend and mythology Francisca knew.

She’d studied so well that she managed to capture the agony of thirst the moment before it was sated.

Elena could never look at the painting without her mouth watering. Without her fangs aching to break free.

Elena couldn’t help but wonder what Francisca would say if she were sitting next to her. Couldn’t stop thinking about how different life would’ve been if she never asked Francisca for a sister.

Tired, she allowed herself to think of her birth parents. It had taken Elena less than a decade to return home to Cádiz, but it had been too late. A smallpox outbreak had taken her mother and father three winters earlier.

If she’d known the morning she snuck out of her house, heart freshly broken by Catalina’s cowardice, that it was the last time she’d see them… Would she have said goodbye? Would she have left? Could living a small life be worth it to avoid the constant pain of loss?

At the sound of familiar footsteps, Elena closed her eyes. Moments later, a soft voice scared away the phantoms clouding Elena’s mind. Chased Elena out of the past she couldn’t change.

“Couldn’t sleep?” Elena asked without turning her head toward the open door.

“Not without you,” Marisol replied so sweetly, the words dripped like honey over Elena’s sore chest.

Elena couldn’t stop her lip from twitching into a smile. Marisol offered her love and affection so easily. It was hard for Elena to believe she deserved it after all the ways she’d failed.

“This looks like it should be hanging in a museum somewhere,” Marisol said when she approached.

Elena’s chuckle rumbled in her throat. Her life felt like a fucking museum. A collection of all the things that had once been.

Marisol stood, wearing nothing but Zuri's T-shirt, messy hair tossed to one side. Illuminated by the sun glowing around the edges of the covered windows, she was angelic even without her wings. Instead of getting up, Elena extended her hand and invited Marisol to sit in her lap.

Marisol slid onto her lap without hesitation. Like maybe that’s where she’d been planning to sit all along.

The weight of Marisol was immediately soothing. She rested one arm around Elena’s shoulders and turned her attention to the painting. “I took art history in college,” Marisol said with a little grin. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten a B- if we were studying things like this.”

Elena wrapped her arms around Marisol’s waist and found the hem of her shirt with her thumb. “And what would you have told your instructor about this work?” She tried to make her voice professorial, even if she didn’t have the desire to role-play.

“You first,” she replied, eyes bright.

Indulging her, Elena looked back at the painting she’d regarded a thousand times.

She ignored the human who was as much a prop as the lounge they were lying on.

The artist’s fascination had been Cleopatra—daughter of cunning and lethal beauty.

Her body, serpentine in its positioning, had reminded Elena of the snake tempting Eve.

“Cleopatra sitting down to dinner,” Elena said after a beat. “Well, reclining is more accurate, I suppose.”

Marisol looked away from the painting and at Elena with a challenge in her hazel eyes. Without a word, she accused Elena of not having answered honestly.

“Interesting,” Marisol said, instead of calling her out directly the way Zuri would. “Because I see someone so full of hesitation. Of fear.” She didn’t take her gaze away from Elena. “Someone who’s afraid that she might ruin everything if she closes the gap and takes a bite.”

Elena didn’t blink. Didn’t move. “You can’t ruin what’s already broken,” she said without pretending to give a shit about the artist’s intention.

Marisol shifted to face Elena as much as she could while remaining seated in her lap.

Using both hands, she ran her fingernails through Elena’s hair, easing it away from her face.

She looked at her like she’d borrowed Zuri’s power.

Like she was peeling away layers and centuries and revealing every fiber of Elena’s essence. Her history. Her shame.

“You’re not broken,” she said, voice gentle and devastating. She ran her palms down to Elena’s face and cradled her jaw so lightly. “But maybe you think you are because you’ve never seen yourself put back together.”

She brushed her lips against Elena’s before pressing their foreheads together. Before filling Elena with an overwhelming warmth.

“Because you’re so used to being the gold that fills in the shattered pottery to make it new,” she muttered, turning Elena’s Kintsugi metaphor into a mirror Elena couldn’t stand to look at.

“Maybe you just have to trust that you’re not the only one who does the mending.

” She slid one hand down Elena’s neck and pressed her palm to her chest. “Maybe you just have to trust that you can be mended too. Trust us to take care of you.”

Heart and lungs and gut all squeezed so tight it was terrifying, Elena shook her head. “Did you take psychoanalysis in college as well?”

“You don’t have to hide from me, Elena.” Marisol’s hand against her sternum was a lighthouse guiding her out of a storm. “I want all the parts of you. Even the ones you think are broken.”

She remembered Marisol’s horror at witnessing Elena’s justice. At watching her kill. “The things I’m going to have to do—”

“I know,” Marisol whispered, “and I don’t love that.

” She rubbed her thumb over Elena’s tense jaw with the hand that wasn’t holding her heart.

“But I realize that you don’t love it either.

” She kissed her again. “That you didn’t choose this and what Sayah is capable of…

” She shook her head as if banishing the same memory that assaulted Elena’s mind.

“She’s not going to leave you in peace even if you waved a white flag. ”

The idea of surrender awoke every muscle in Elena’s body. Made her want to tear off into the night and find Sayah. To rip her apart before she stole another breath on borrowed time.

But she’d do it, Elena admitted to herself. She’d let Sayah win if she could guarantee that all the people she loved would survive. She’d bow out of the fight. Her ego wasn’t nearly as important as her family.

“No matter what comes, Elena.” Marisol kissed her cheek, the bridge of her nose, her forehead. Touched her with a tenderness Elena almost didn’t know how to absorb. “I’m with you until the very end.”

The backs of Elena’s eyes burned with how much she wanted to believe Marisol. With how badly she wanted to deserve her.

“You’re not alone.” Marisol turned around to straddle Elena’s lap.

To hold her face close to her chest like Elena might hear the truth of her conviction in Marisol’s racing heart.

“You’re not alone,” she repeated with the pain of all the loneliness she’d known before Elena crashed into her life.

“You never were. Even when you tried to be.”

“If you had it all to do again,” Elena asked the question weighing down her heart, “would you have taken the day off work?” She clarified, “Assuming I would have survived just the same if you hadn’t been in the hospital that night.

But if you could have continued on with your peaceful, normal reality, never knowing—”

“Would I have chosen never to meet you?” Marisol tipped her head to the side like the question was unintelligible. “Is that what you’re asking me? Would I choose my old life and erase all of this? Erase you?”

Embarrassed at her own question but wanting to know the truth, Elena nodded.

Marisol drew her eyebrows together. “Elena,” she chuckled without any amusement.

“What life?” She ran her hands through Elena’s hair again.

This time, the touch was even more loving.

“Before you and Zuri and Sofia and Lib… I was just… existing.” Her eyes were wide and begging Elena to believe her.

“Never in my life did I think I’d ever have the kind of love I have with you and Zuri.

And since I lost my grandmother”—emotion swelled in her eyes when she hesitated—“I never thought I’d fit anywhere.

I had settled for fine without knowing there was an entire galaxy of feelings I’d never experienced before.

” Her voice cracked along with the restraint holding back Elena’s emotions.

“I love you. And I choose you. Over and over and over.”