This Time Tomorrow (Phenomenal Fate 2)

Once again you’ve come to bargain for my daughter’s life, have you? Maybe trade another year of your life away in my prison?

Words from her own mother’s mouth. Words that made acid rise in her throat, the hair standing up on the back of her neck. What did that mean? Elias had bargained with Inessa for her life? He’d gone there of his own free will?

That alone would have been enough to riddle her with anguish, if she wasn’t distracted by the why. If Elias had traded a year in the slayer prison to keep her safe, then…he must have struck that bargain with Inessa in Vegas.

The video footage from the chapel rolled behind her eyelids.

Elias pressed to the door, holding it closed, denying his primal instincts to feed.

Oh God.

A wail conjured itself in her belly. Her entire body ached under the pressure of keeping it sealed tight. Don’t break.

There were too many realizations hitting her at once, but chief among them was…she and Elias were not safe here. They were, in fact, in very serious danger.

My mother is not who I believed.

Or rather, she’d ignored her intuition on the matter. She’d made excuses for not only warning signs that her mother was treacherous, but she’d endured proof of her mother’s duplicity by succumbing to her affections one minute, then enduring a beating ordered by the woman the next.

She wanted to look at Elias over her mother’s shoulder, but forced her eyes to remain closed, instead. This meeting would have an important outcome and in that moment, knowing the two most important people in her life had kept secrets from her, Roksana vowed the outcome would be hers to decide—and hers alone.

One mistake could cost her everything.

“I’m sorry, Mother,” she breathed, the woman’s perfume nowhere near as pleasant as she’d once found it. No longer cool and elegant, it was blade sharp and aloof. “I come to you again as a failure. But this time I am humble. This time I will not spout bullshit and tell you I am the best. Clearly I am not.”

“Once again you need to be broken down and rebuilt in my image.” Inessa stroked a hand roughly down the back of Roksana’s head, rings catching in her hair. “Your faults do not rest solely on your shoulders, daughter. After all, I trained you. I will take some of the blame for your shortcomings and repair them as only I can.”

“Yes.” Heat scalded the backs of her eyelids, anguish roiling in her stomach, eroding the lining. “I understand now why you took them from me.”

The hand stroking her head paused, ever so briefly, but it was enough to confirm Roksana’s suspicions.

Inessa was responsible for killing her friends.

Inessa was responsible for Elias becoming a vampire.

If he’d made a bargain to spare her life…then had her own mother originally intended to murder her, too?

Bile rose in her throat and it took every reserve of her willpower not to scream down the night sky. “We have to learn hard lessons,” Inessa soothed. “It can be even harder sometimes to teach them. We can start now. Tonight. We can move forward now with a clean slate.”

Inessa eased back, but kept Roksana glued to her side, turning as one to face Elias. If she noticed her daughter shaking in rage, she must have chalked it up to nerves or shame. And she would have been right. How blind and gullible she’d been. How much time she’d wasted stewing in misdirected hatred. The revelations were forming so fast, one after the other, it took a moment for Elias’s face to come into focus—and it gave away nothing.

Roksana struggled to follow suit. To be strong.

“We will end this here and now,” Inessa murmured in her ear. “Cut the tie of this unhealthy tether and we will begin anew. With Tilda out of the way, we can claim her throne for ourselves. Play both sides as we choose, because only the dexterous survive. We will ride side by side into glory, just you and me. Victors of the uprising. This is all we’ve ever needed, isn’t it? Each other.”

There is no right side in a war. Only profiteers.

Her mother’s statement rippled through her consciousness. If she was responsible for Elias being Silenced, she had to be working with the vampires. She would actually hand over the names and locations of the North American slayers…to the vampires.

Putting them all in jeopardy.

Her own kind. Did Inessa even have a kind?

Inessa pressed a stake into Roksana’s hand, distracting her from yet another devastating insight into her mother’s double life. She closed her fingers around it and a wrench twisted in her middle, making her want to heave. Still, Elias’s expression didn’t change. “You will have the strength this time, because I will be standing at your back, daughter.”