All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [77]
“I want you to call the lines together again, and declare the Rights of Kin satisfied,” Adianna said.
“I can’t just decide—”
“You called them,” Zachary interrupted. “You can declare satisfaction, and it will be over.”
Only upon hearing Zachary speak did emotion start to rise again: anger. She grasped at it and the righteous indignation that she had used for years to keep her moving when she wanted to stop, and let herself fall apart.
“How can you stand here, next to that thing, and talk to me about it being over?”
Adianna continued as if she had never spoken, giving her nothing against which to keep arguing.
“And then,” she said, “while the lines are still there, I want you to step down as matriarch of the Vida line. If you do not … if you cannot, I will call you to trial for crimes against the line.”
“Dommy.” Jerome stepped forward. Dominique tried to pull back again, but was already against the wall. He caught her hands, and she didn’t seem to have the will to take them away again.
Once upon a time, she would have followed him anywhere. She had believed him when he had spun stories about how she could be more than just a Vida, about how she deserved more than the narrow life her family wanted to define for her. She had trusted him when he had said he would take care of her.
“This isn’t like last time,” he said.
“Please,” Frederick begged her. “I can’t live like this.” He dropped to his knees and clasped his hands behind his back, saying that one word over and over as tears tracked through the dried blood on his face. “Please.”
She yanked her hands out of Jerome’s and crossed her arms tightly over her chest.
He never turned away from her, but stepped carefully back. He knew she would kill him if only she could make her body move.
After Frederick had died—after she had killed Frederick—she had tried to convince Jacqueline not to make the same mistake. They had both been wild; Jacqueline had a shapeshifter boyfriend her mother never knew about, who had been trying to convince her to give up the hunting. Dominique had tried to warn her.
The last time Jacqueline had stormed out, she had been gone seven months. She had left behind her Vida blade and a note saying she wasn’t coming back. Human police had found her body, with a broken neck and drained of blood, at a club she used to frequent.
“Dominique?” Adianna asked.
Dominique looked at her oldest daughter, and it was like a stranger was standing there. A few days earlier, Adianna had told her Sarah was carrying on with a creature from her school. Sarah had come home, and all Dominique had been able to see was herself, walking into the house ready for a fight, and Jacqueline, sneaking out to see her shapeshifter suitor.
“I’m going to step out now,” Jerome announced. “Someone let me know how it goes.”
He disappeared. Dominique stared at where he had been, unwilling to turn her gaze back to the two hunters standing before her.
“Dominique.” Adianna’s voice cut like a blade, even more so when she said, “Mother. Please. I don’t know what you’ve done or what you think you’re guilty of, but I am your daughter, and I forgive you. But you must step down. We cannot continue this way, or we will not survive.”
“Would you have us give up everything we are, to survive?”
“We don’t even know what we are,” Zachary replied softly. He drew a deep breath and then announced, “I’m going to go ring Olivia. Adia, let me know when you’re calling the lines.”
He said the words with mock calm, but Dominique could see the tremble in his back as he walked away. She knew Olivia. Jerome and Olivia were a team.
She felt like she was drowning. She looked up at Adianna’s bright blue gaze, and the shame and horror was bile in her throat. She realized that her nails were cutting crescents into her crossed arms. Once—or, more accurately, a hundred or more times—she would have called to Jerome when she felt like this. She would have put herself in his arms and he would have taken away every emotion she could possibly feel.
Leaving him