All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [76]
“No,” he said as he pushed the door open ahead of them. “She did.”
The “she” in question, who was waiting for them, turned in the middle of a demand. “Adia, Zachary …” Adia could tell exactly when Dominique saw Jerome. It was as if Dominique’s mind refused to process what she was seeing right away. The words kept coming, with an empty sound, despite the horror on her face. “I don’t appreciate being … being ordered to meet you.… Is it … You said you would find Sarah tonight.… I … oh, my god.”
She stumbled backward until her shoulders were pressed against the far wall, her eyes locked on Jerome.
Jerome greeted her with a smile and a “Hello, luv. It’s been a while.”
Zachary looked from Dominique to Jerome, his eyes going wide. He stammered, “You … sh-she … I thought …”
He looked at Adia with desperation, hope and resignation nakedly warring on his face. He had thought she was about to turn him in.
“I did as I swore I would,” Adia said to Dominique. She had to clear her throat, but managed to continue at an audible level. “Now, Mother, I think we need to talk.”
In the moment when Adianna and Zachary walked through the door with Jerome, Dominique Vida saw her life flash before her eyes.
She saw herself on a city street at night, a pink rose falling in front of her feet from a balcony several stories up. She saw herself blushing furiously when, after she had sneaked into a club to get away from her mother for a night, someone who should have been her prey asked her to dance. There had been a shouting argument with her mother that afternoon, and she had been angry and hurt, so she had said, to hell with it, and she had danced with him.
And over weeks, he had courted her. There had been flowers, and candy, and dancing, and one night it had seemed natural when he pulled her close to just lean her head back. She had wanted to know what it felt like. She had needed to know why, when she was hunting these monsters, so many humans were running after them, begging to be used as a midnight snack even if it meant risking their lives.
Now here he was, in front of her, with the daughter whose birth had made Dominique swear up and down that she could be better, stronger, perfect, so her children would never need to go through the same thing, and the nephew she had promised her dead sister she would always take care of.
“Frederick is a good hunter. He’s a good match for you.”
“He has the personality of a ferret,” she replied. “I’m going out.”
“You are not going out. You have—”
“Bye!”
Another night. She met Jerome down the street, swung a leg over his Harley-Davidson and tucked her head down against his shoulder. She wrapped her arms around his waist and made herself forget the fact that he didn’t have a heartbeat. Hers beat fast enough for both of them, right?
The speed and the wind swept the sound of her mother’s voice out of her ears.
He brought her to a party, to a place where she wasn’t Dominique Vida, hunter, but just Dommy, a pretty girl who got to dance, and play, and flirt, and go wild. And when it was too much, and the ringing of expectations in her ears was too loud, she could go to him and bare her throat and he could make it all disappear in a haze.
“You told me you would leave me alone,” she said to Jerome. Her voice sounded flat in her ears, not from Vida control, but from the absolute inability to summon any energy or emotion at all.
There was no use denying that she knew him. There was no reason Adianna and Zachary would bring him here unless they already knew the truth. She had seen the horror on Zachary’s face before he had composed himself.
Now they were standing there with expressions like glass, smooth and flawless and fake, and she knew it because she was the one who had taught them how to wear those masks.
“I owed some favors to some friends,” he answered.
“What do you want?”
Was it fear she was feeling? Or perhaps something more like relief? She couldn’t tell. She felt like she was walking through a dreamscape, with someone else speaking for her.
Jerome looked at Adia, who