All Just Glass - Amelia Atwater-Rhodes [78]
Now she had no choice but to feel it all.
She wasn’t even sure she knew how.
EPILOGUE
SUNDAY, 6:15 A.M.
ZACHARY BREWED COFFEE as dawn light began to seep through the windows at Olivia’s apartment. Normally, he was a tea drinker, but this was a bitter morning.
Olivia wrapped her arms around his waist from behind.
“No word yet?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“Dommy will do what she needs to do,” Jerome said from the couch, where he was flipping through one of Olivia’s books on human psychology. “She’s a practical girl that way.”
“I still can’t believe the two of you had a relationship,” Jay remarked as he accepted a cup of coffee from Zachary. “Is this handmade?” he asked Olivia as he paused to admire the mug. She smiled and nodded. “It’s beautiful.” Returning to the subject, he added, “I mean, she’s Dominique the indomitable. Even I can’t read her most of the time. It’s like the emotions just aren’t there. I have a hard time picturing her as a wild, rebellious partygoer.”
Across the room, Robert laughed, a bitter, barking sound. The human had been cautiously excited when Christine had called him and asked him to join them all for breakfast and news at Olivia’s. “It’s like the straight-A Catholic school kid who goes out and gets drunk every weekend,” he said. “You can’t be that tightly wound without going a little nuts.”
“More like a recovering alcoholic violently preaching sobriety,” Olivia suggested. “Dommy used us to hide, and to relax. The only way to give that up was to remove any possible temptation.”
“She could have just stayed with us, if she was that unhappy with her real life,” Heather suggested sleepily from her perch on the back of the couch, behind Jerome.
Jerome shook his head. “She blamed herself for too much. Frederick followed her one night, and one of our kind grabbed him while she was with me,” Jerome explained. “Olivia and I didn’t even know about it until he showed up the next night with fangs, telling Dommy he couldn’t live this way. He begged her to kill him. She tried to say no, but he kept telling her she owed it to him, that he wouldn’t be this creature if not for her. It was like she shut down. I don’t know what part of her she had to kill to put a knife in his heart, but she did it. Then she turned around, told me never to speak to her again and went home.”
“Poor Dommy.” Heather sighed. “She was such a sweet, addled little creature.”
The front door opened, admitting a bruised Adia and an exhausted Michael. All voices in the apartment hushed as everyone waited to hear what she would say. She looked around, not speaking until the rest of Olivia’s guests emerged from the bedrooms.
“Is it over?” Kristopher asked.
“It’s over,” Adia answered. “Dominique has declared the Rights of Kin satisfied. She won’t hunt you anymore.”
“She won’t hunt much of anyone anymore,” Michael said. “She announced that Adia’s performance on this last mission was exemplary, and named Adia the new matriarch of the Vida line. Dominique has stepped aside. Evan Marinitch is convinced she is having a mental breakdown. She refuses to talk to him, so the Smoke witches are trying to convince her that a tropical vacation would be good for her health.”
“How do you feel?” Kristopher asked Adia.
She rubbed her bruised throat and then shrugged. “I’ve been worse. How ’bout you, Sis?”
Most of them turned to look at Sarah, who was standing with Nikolas a little behind Kristopher. She stepped into the room shyly and answered, “Grateful you’re as good as you are, but still like I took a knife to the heart. And I think Kendra is cross at me for bleeding on an eight-hundred-dollar dress.”
Kristopher added, “It would have been nice to know the plan a little earlier.”
“That wasn’t part of the plan,” Jerome insisted.
If Adia