Persecuted

Her heart lurched. Just with surprise, she told herself. Joseph seemed more the type to shake someone than hold her. Curiously enough she’d always respected that about him, that he wasn’t the type to coddle anyone, that he was so strong that he demanded strength from those around him.

When she opened her eyes, his head was close. He had to be leaning, because he was tall, well over six feet with wide shoulders and a chest so muscular it strained the buttons on his gray shirt and suit. His deep green eyes softened with concern. Elena wasn’t used to a man looking at her like that, not since her father died. But underneath the concern was something that unsettled her even more, an awareness that hummed between them; another reason she could never use his first name. For them, it would be too intimate.

Like her dream.

She resisted the urge to tremble and lifted her chin instead. “I’m fine.”

“Yes, you are,” he agreed, his voice deepening with innuendo as he teased her. He always teased her.

Her palm itched to slap him. He didn’t know that she’d filed for divorce. She’d told no one yet. For all he knew she was a happily married woman. Didn’t anyone respect marriage anymore?

Heat warmed her face, as an image from the dream tugged at her memory. Arms and chest rippling with muscles, wrapping tight around her, pulling her close so that skin brushed skin. She drew in a shuddery breath. But that had been just a dream, not a vision. She was never going to make love with him. She would make certain of it, and if she could change that part of her future, she could change more.

She was here, in her grandmother’s wing, because she couldn’t keep ignoring her visions. They weren’t going away; they just kept getting worse. Not for her, but for the people she saw in them. She had to help. Like that ancestor who had so long ago warned about the lightning that would cause the house fire and begin the vendetta, Elena had to take the risk—even if she was the one who wound up getting burned.

“Excuse me,” she said, stepping around Joseph. “I need to speak to her.”

Then she closed the door, shutting him into the hall and herself into her grandmother’s rooms. The parlor, a profusion of Victorian roses and fragile, antique furniture, misled the visitor into thinking Thora Jones a delicate, old-fashioned woman. Nothing could be further from the reality.

Double doors led off the empty parlor into the den. Without knocking, Elena opened those doors into her grandmother’s real sanctum: dark, heavy woods, dim light and the faint, lingering odor of pungently sweet cigars. Elena had never caught her smoking them, but she suspected it was one of her grandmother’s many vices.

The woman lifted her gaze from the files on her desk, which was cluttered with more picture frames than work. Most of the photographs were of Elena’s father, Elijah Jones. The only ones of Elena were snapshots taken with him. Thora’s parlor also had several pictures of him, among the gardening ribbons and plaques, but this room with its faint light and solemn atmosphere felt more like a shrine to him.

This was where, since his death, Thora worshipped her son.

Elena turned her attention from the framed photographs to the woman behind the desk. Her grandmother’s hair was as blond as Elena’s, her eyes as eerily blue. Despite her seventy-three years, very few lines marred her pale complexion. Sometimes Elena wondered if her grandmother had sold her soul for beauty or immortality, but that thought was ridiculous.

Thora had sold her soul for vengeance.

Chapter 2

The older woman leaned back in her chair. But Elena suspected the nonchalance was feigned; tension emanated from Thora’s trim body. “So…you’re finally paying your grandmother a visit? How sweet.” From her sarcastic tone, she considered it anything but.

So did Elena. “We need to talk.”

Thora expelled an exasperated sigh. “I hope you’re not going to bring up that foolishness of moving out again. It’s your home, too. Your father saw to that in his will. And I think we’ve done very well these past six months at staying out of each other’s way,” she pointed out, then added, “until now.”

“I’m not here to talk about moving out.” Although she intended to, once her divorce from Kirk was settled, this house had never been her home. But she had something far more important than moving to discuss. Because Elena had yet to tell her grandmother about Ariel, because she wasn’t certain that she should, she said, “I have to find them.”

To her credit Thora didn’t ask who, even though they hadn’t had this conversation for a long time, since Elena was a girl desperate to be reunited with her mother and half sisters. “Not this again.”

“You know where they are.” Thora knew everything. Sometimes Elena wondered if she, too, was cursed. In a way, she supposed Thora was, but her special abilities were money and power. The only problem was she would never have enough of either to make her happy. The money couldn’t buy her happiness; it hadn’t even been able to save her only child.

“What’s brought this on? Is this about your father?” Thora asked.

So much of the past twenty years had been about her father. He’d been sick for so long his death should have been a relief, but Elena still ached for missing him. She shook her head. “No.”

“You’re missing him so much that you want to find some other family now,” Thora speculated. “They’re not your family, Elle.”

“They’re my sisters, and I need to find them.” An image flashed through her mind, of the curly dark-haired woman tied to a makeshift stake, of flames rising up around her, swallowing her as she was trapped in the middle, screaming. Even though pain hammered at her temples, she raised her voice, shouting, “Now!”

Thora’s eyes widened with surprise over Elena’s vehemence. Then her mouth twisted into a patronizing smile. “You aren’t a little girl anymore, Elle. It’s past time you grow up and realize they won’t want to see you. You’re the reason they were split up, that they grew up in foster homes. They know that, and they must hate you for it.”

She’d heard this first when she was twelve; it hurt no less now, all these years later. But she wasn’t a child anymore. She could hold back the tears and hide the pain, but she’d done that even at twelve, convincing herself that Thora lied to her, that her mom and sisters were still together. Lying to herself was smarter than showing her grandmother any sign of weakness; instinctively she’d known that then. That, like so many other things, hadn’t changed over the past twenty years.

Drawing on her strength and pride, Elena lifted her chin and revealed, “Ariel doesn’t hate me.”

The color drained from Thora’s face. “You’ve already found one of them?”

“She 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 that she especially wanted Stacia. She just wanted to manipulate Elena. Since she couldn’t do it through Elena’s father anymore, she would do it through Elena’s daughter.

Elena did understand the older woman. She understood that Thora couldn’t let her son go despite his death. She needed more than the pictures piled on her desk and adorning every wall of her rooms. Because Elena and Stacia were part of him, she wanted to keep them close even though she hated that Elena was also a part of her mother, and had been punishing Myra through her since the day she’d brought Elena to this house.

Joseph stepped close, the sleeve of his suit brushing against the silk of her blouse. Even through the two layers of material, his heat penetrated, raising her temperature. Her face flushed. She would have stepped away, but her back was against the door. And he towered over her, imposing, intimidating.

Was this why her grandmother had hired him? Because just his presence, his brawn and the breadth of his shoulders and chest, was threatening? Elena suspected the greater threat was the sharp intelligence burning in his green eyes.

“Why do you hate me, Elena?” he asked. His voice, deep and soft, lifted the hair on the nape of her neck. His wicked grin never slipped, amusement lightening his eyes.

Damn him, he knew. She wanted to but couldn’t quite hate him, no matter how much she tried. She opened her mouth, ready to list the reasons, some she’d vented before, like his subordinates sending her husband away on business too much. But that had been more help than hardship. She’d realized that absence hadn’t made her heart grow fonder, only Kirk more faithless. She couldn’t blame Joseph for that, since Kirk didn’t work directly under him. She couldn’t even blame Joseph for the dreams.

All she could do was ask, “Why do you work for her?”

Was it blackmail? Like what kept Elena in this house, the threat of her grandmother using the considerable means at her disposal to take away what mattered most to Elena, her daughter? What was Thora holding over Joseph Dolce? What mattered most to this man?

He shrugged, and his arm moved against hers, wool scraping against silk. “Money. She pays me well.”

“To do her dirty work,” Elena scoffed, inexplicably disappointed that he wasn’t being coerced, too. This was why she had to hate him, why she could never trust him. He was just as soulless and manipulative as his employer, willing to do whatever necessary for money and power. “I hope it’s enough.”

His dark head nodded, but his green eyes dimmed, the amusement gone. “It’s a lot of money, more than I ever really thought a kid who grew up like I did could make.” Wistfulness deepened his voice. “I used to dream about the fast cars, big houses and fancy—” the wicked grin flashed a brief appearance as he stared down at her “—women.”

He considered her a fancy woman? On the outside, she might look the part of an heiress, with the silk clothes and sleek hairdo and manicured nails. Inside, she was still that little girl who’d grown up in the back of a truck camper, eating cold canned food and wishing for a hot shower and a soft bed, one she hadn’t had to share with younger sisters who kicked and flailed elbows in their sleep. Guilt nagged at her, as it had twenty years ago, when she’d thought her wishing had caused her mom to lose her and her sisters. She’d gotten her hot shower and soft bed, but she hadn’t been able to sleep in it for a long time. She’d missed her sisters, flailing elbows and feet, too much.

“So you got what you wished for,” she pointed out to Joseph, but for some reason she suspected he wasn’t any happier than she’d been. “Was it worth it, selling out to Thora?”

She had no doubt the older woman made him do things, probably illegal things, to get her what she wanted for her corporation and herself. Perhaps that was another reason why Thora hadn’t hired her; she’d known Elena would have wanted to run the company honestly.

Irritation darkened his eyes. “You can act all sanctimonious and self-righteous,” he accused. “You don’t have a damn clue how it is growing up with nothing—”

“I’ve been poor,” she interrupted him. But she hadn’t had nothing. She’d had her mom and her sisters. Their love. She swept an arm around the wide corridor full of antiques and framed artwork. “And obviously I’ve been rich. I was much happier poor.”

He stepped even closer, his legs brushing hers, only inches separating his chest from hers. She could nearly feel the beat of his heart beneath his wool suit and silk shirt. She lifted her palms, wanting to push him away. But she dropped her hands back to her sides and fisted them, not trusting herself to touch him…because she couldn’t trust him.

Interest narrowed his green eyes as he studied her. “There’s a helluva lot I don’t know about you, isn’t there?”

“More than you could handle,” she admitted.

“That sounds like a challenge,” he said, the amusement back in his wicked grin and sparkling eyes, as he lifted her chin with the pad of his thumb.

He stroked her skin, which until that moment Elena had never known was so sensitive. She bit her bottom lip, resisting temptation. Then she lifted her fists, using them to shove against his chest so she could step away from the door and away from him.

“I’ve never backed down from a challenge, Elena,” he warned her, as she walked away.

If he learned the truth, would he look at her like Thora did? Like Kirk had started to look at her, when he dared meet her eyes?

Like she was crazy.

God, she wished she was, then she wouldn’t have to worry about her visions, any of her visions, coming true.

Elena sat up in bed, her back sinking into the pillows piled against the brass headboard. A book lay open across her bent knees, but she couldn’t concentrate on the words on the page, swimming in and out of focus. She was so tired but too afraid to sleep…for the dreams she might dream.

Tomorrow she would talk to Ariel. Together, they would find their little sister. They would make sure none of Elena’s visions of Irina came true. With that thought giving her some peace, she drifted off to sleep…until a cry awoke her. For once, it wasn’t hers, drawn out by a horrifying vision.

She threw back the blankets and ran the short distance down the hall to Stacia’s room, which was aglow with ambient light from the Strawberry Shortcake lamp next to the little girl’s bed.

“Sweetheart,” she murmured, pulling the little girl into her arms. “It’s okay. Shhh…”

Stacia hiccupped out a soft sob and burrowed against her mother. “Daddy…” she called out sleepily.

Elena brushed her daughter’s blond curls off her damp forehead. “It’s okay, honey. Mommy’s here.”

The same could not be said of Daddy. Elena knew she’d done the right thing, taking the first step to end her sham of a marriage, for her daughter’s sake. If Mommy and Daddy no longer lived together, she would understand why he was never around, instead of her confusion giving her nightmares. She rocked the warm little body in her arms as Stacia snuggled against her.

“Where’s Daddy?” the little girl asked.

No doubt in another woman’s bed. But she couldn’t tell her daughter that. “He’s away, honey. Remember? He had a business trip.”

Stacia rubbed her eyes, which were the same pale blue as Elena’s and Thora’s. “I saw him in my dream,” she said.

Of course she had to dream about the man; he was never around. Why wouldn’t he just sign the papers and officially end their marriage? Elena suspected he’d grown too accustomed to their big house and his fast cars and didn’t want to give them up. He’d worked with Thora and Joseph too long.

“Did you dream about your daddy, honey?” she asked. At least when Kirk was around, he played with Stacia. He wasn’t the most devoted father, but he could be fun, playing silly games with their little girl. Too bad he was playing games with Elena, too.

“He was with somebody, Mommy. And then—” she shuddered “—something bad happened…”

The fine hair on the nape of Elena’s neck lifted as foreboding washed over her. Her daughter couldn’t be talking about a vision. She couldn’t be cursed, too. Elena ignored the little voice in her head, reminding her of the Durikken legacy passed from generation to generation.

“What happened, Stacia?” she asked.

Small shoulders lifted in a jerky shrug as fear thickened her voice. “I dunno…I was hiding…”

“It was just a dream, sweetheart.” It had to have been. Her daughter couldn’t be cursed, too.

But if not for the vendetta, perhaps having visions wouldn’t be a curse. Through them Elena had learned what man to divorce…and what man to resist. If not for the killer continuing the vendetta, she wouldn’t be having visions of murder.

“Let me read you a story,” she told Stacia, asking nothing more about her daughter’s dream. She’d like to think she was doing it to avoid upsetting Stacia any further, but it was probably herself she didn’t want to upset. Denial was her oldest, closest friend; she had preferred it to counseling and anti-hallucinatory drugs.

She picked up a book from the table beside the bed. Even though she was only four, Stacia could read most of the words in her books, or maybe it was just that she memorized them from Elena having read them to her so many times. Either way, she was one smart little girl.

Elena pulled her daughter close and opened the book across her lap. She read of princesses and glittery white unicorns, but in her head, she didn’t see those images.