14. Cove

Chapter 14

Cove

The look Coral turned on me when Florian was gone was utterly betrayed, and dammit, but that wasn’t true. “He isn’t?—”

“He’s a Dawnchaser,” she hissed through her teeth. “They’re all the same, Cove. Look at this. I leave you alone for less than a week and come back to find one of them atop you. They’re fucking snakes. Insidious monsters, all of them, and all with the same goal?—”

“Florian is already going to be head of a family,” I pointed out, trying to stay calm. It wouldn’t help for me to get angry in my defense of Florian. It would, in fact, be all too familiar. Like a replay of my first visit to this place.

“You told him you own this place. He thinks he needs to use you to get what he wants.” She took a step to her right, so that she was directly between me and the door. Like she could protect me from the whole of the Dawnchaser family simply by her physical presence.

“He knows the truth. He figured it out himself.” I cocked my head, considering. “No, I think Kit Emrys helped, but still. He came to me and told me he knows I’m trying to anger his father with this show of power.”

Her eyes narrowed even further at the reminder of Huxley’s assassin. “Now Winter is helping them read you better? What the hell is he thinking?”

Now that, I couldn’t answer. I didn’t think he was doing anything sinister, but maybe that was because he’d always been my biggest blind spot. My only blind spot, since I’d covered myself with my armor of indifference.

Still, keeping Huxley Dawnchaser in his sights didn’t seem unwise to me. In the stories, Kit Emrys had always kept an eye on the villains, because he was the only one clever enough to understand what they were up to and keep them in check. It would have been very like my Kit to think he ought to do the same. Keep your friends close and your enemies even closer , I’d always told him. Keep an eye on the whole chessboard. You have to have all the information, so learn all you can.

He’d taken to it so well. Unlike Delta’s demands that he go to college and learn a science, he’d been interested in tactics and strategy. He’d willingly spent hours reading the biographies of ancient family heads and war leaders and generals.

I’d hoped it would satisfy her, but of course, it hadn’t. Especially not when Frost, barely a year his junior, had plowed through every science offered to him like a bulldozer. It had never been Frost’s intention to offer a counterpoint, be the golden child to Kit’s rebel, but it was how things had ended up.

And every time I’d tried to involve myself, Delta had reminded me of my promise to stay out of how she chose to raise the children.

That was over. If Kit ever agreed to be in contact with me or any of the family again, Delta be damned, I’d do everything I possibly could to make up for what we’d lost.

“Cove,” Coral said, frowning at me. “Damn it all, I knew coming to this place was a mistake. We might as well be right back there, then, and?—”

I dragged myself off the desk, sighing as I straightened my clothes. If only she’d arrived an hour later, Florian and I...no, this was for the best. We should take our time. Not hop straight into bed but move slowly. Judiciously. Florian and I having sex right then would have proven Coral right, if only in her own mind.

Finally, I turned back to her. “Florian is not Afton, Coral. I’m not a child anymore. I know what I’m doing. If anything, I’m the one with the undue advantage. I’m far too old to be panting after a man in his twenties.”

“But he wants you to?—”

“There’s nothing I can give him that he can’t get without me. Nothing but me . The family vassal, Olivier, has been practically running all of Dawnchaser lands, and he would happily teach him. I can’t and wouldn’t withhold his money or position. I can’t give him power in Moonstriker lands and wouldn’t if I could.”

She stopped trying to interrupt me, but she was still scowling. Still suspicious. I couldn’t blame her. They were Dawnchasers, and I’d been suspicious when we’d arrived.

I’d sent her off looking for signs of Huxley on his other properties to get her out of the estate house, hoping to keep her safer and happier, but instead, I had worried her. I stepped into her space, reaching up to lay my hands on her shoulders. “Everything is fine, Coral. The matter with Huxley is going as planned. Florian is not his father, not loyal to his father, and I’m not a child who can be fooled with a pretty face anymore.”

She threw herself against me, burying her face in my chest and breathing hard. “It was...I just...all I could think was her. That night. The fucking mess after.”

I let my arms fall around her, holding her tight. “I know, love. I’m so sorry. But I promise you, this isn’t the same. We’ll never let anything like that happen again.”

She nodded against me and took a moment to compose herself before backing away, wiping at her eyes and breathing hard. “I haven’t found anything. I was on my way to the next one this morning, talking to Frost about where it was, and he said he’d make a route map for me, so I thought I’d stop back here and have dinner before setting out again. Then...”

She trailed off, looking at the desk, expression forlorn.

“He’s twenty-two,” I reminded her.

“So was Afton.”

“And it’s been almost thirty years. I’m not fifteen anymore. It makes twenty-two look rather different, don’t you think?”

She didn’t say anything, but took a deep breath, closing her eyes, and finally nodded.

“Now let’s have dinner, and you can discuss this map with Frost.” I glanced out the office window behind me, frowning. “Though I have to admit, I think it’s all a waste of your time. Florian ran into Kit today. Here. I think Kit hasn’t left Huxley alone, so that means Huxley is somewhere here at the estate.”

Coral shuddered beside me, glaring out the window herself. “So he already knows you’re here. Hiding somewhere out there in those damned Dawnchaser flowers, waiting for you to make a mistake so he can kill you.”

I wrapped an arm around her, turning us both away from the window and heading into the hallway. “So what you’re saying is that nothing has changed.”

She sighed and let her head fall onto my shoulder. “I’ll be glad when we can leave this place.” I winced, and she looked up at me sharply, her tone turned warning. “Cove?”

“I offered to help teach Florian about how to run a family.”

“But he has nothing to gain from you.” The look on her face said it was every negative thing she’d been thinking, proven right.

I couldn’t let that stand. Still, to disabuse her of her incorrect conclusion, I had to tell her the truth. “I...I think it’s an excuse.” I turned and met her eye. “On my end. To spend more time with him.”

Her eyes rounded, and she stared at me, not saying another word until we found Frost. He was sitting at the dining room table with Fawn, oddly enough. It was a little early for dinner, but not much, and he had his computer sitting in front of himself.

“And that’s trees?” Fawn was asking, looking dubious.

“It is,” he agreed. “If you were looking down on them from above, that’s what trees look like. And that’s a field, so it’s a little bit lighter green.”

“Why?”

Frost cocked his head at her, but then entirely took the question at face value, and started to explain the shade of the grass was, in fact, lighter than most trees. And also something about light reflections and...it was all very Frost.

I wondered, though, if anyone had ever treated Fawn this way before. As though of course she would understand, if they simply explained it to her. From Florian, I had the feeling everyone in the family had tiptoed around the very fact of Fawn’s existence.

How much better off would she be if she’d been raised with Frost, who would have simply helped her learn instead of ignoring her presence? Florian had helped, I was sure, but Frost was special.

He should be a teacher, with all that information and apparently infinite patience.

I wondered if he thought of all of us the same way as he thought of Fawn.

Why not? It wasn’t like she was so very different from anyone else when all was said and done, other than that she was delightfully innocent compared to most of the people I knew.

“But why does the line go around in a circle?” Fawn asked, dubious, her nose scrunched adorably.

“Because this is where we’re starting,” Frost said, pointing to a spot on his computer screen, “at the estate manor. Then visiting all the houses your father owns, then coming back.” He must be showing her the route he was suggesting to Coral.

“Why?”

I had to choke back amusement. It was very like a phase all the children had gone through, when they’d first learned those pesky W questions. Frost especially had wanted to know why about every single thing. Delta had gotten bored and assigned a tutor to answer the constant questions, and Frost had wrung every drop of knowledge he could out of the situation. Accordingly, he had not a bit of hesitation about answering Fawn’s similar line of questioning.

“Because we need to know where your father is, if Uncle Cove is going to kill him.” Also, since Fawn hadn’t reacted poorly to the idea of her father’s death, he wasn’t throttling back on the simple facts in order to be sensitive.

“Oh,” she said, nodding. “But that’s silly.”

Coral lifted a brow and Frost looked like nothing so much as a confused puppy, but before anyone could ask Fawn what she meant, she continued.

“Winnie says there’s no reason to look for him. He’ll come here. Only Flor and Cove can make him come. And only they can handle it. And Kit. And...”—she squinted, like she was struggling to see something—“someone else, I think.”

“You can see it?” I asked, keeping my voice deliberately light. I didn’t want to pry, precisely, but she seemed to be exhibiting signs that she was bonded to a stone. It made sense, but she wasn’t wearing one that I could see. I kept Haim on a stud in my ear, and most people I knew wore their stones around their necks. Fawn wore no jewelry at all.

“Kinda,” she agreed. “Winnie shows me things. She said it’ll all be okay, as long as we’re right.”

“As long as you’re...right?” Frost was the one to ask the question I suspected we were all thinking.

“About everyone,” Fawn said, smiling at him. “You know, how you’re nice and Cove’s nice and Kit’s nice and all that. As long as we’re right, and no one turns out to be a bad guy, everything will be fine. And Winnie is never wrong.”

And that? Well, it was surprisingly reassuring.

I had no doubts about myself or Coral or Frost, obviously.

Florian? Well, I was definitely starting to feel a certain way about him, and for that to have any chance at success, I had to trust him.

Kit was the only wild card, but I had to trust anyway.

I had to trust that nurture was more important than nature, and that failing that, that my son had inherited more from me than from Afton fucking Dawnchaser, and he was still the boy I’d tried my best to help raise, despite Delta trying to force me to stay out of his life.