moments. She swept him up in her arms and turned back for the stairs.
A gasp in her throat, she stopped in her tracks. There was no way to use the stairs anymore. The fire had caught along the balustrade and begun to lick at the expensive wallpaper. It was already reaching for the crown molding around the ceiling, the paint starting to bubble.
Émilie knew she could not panic in front of her little brother. So she raced toward the back of the home and put him down. “Stay right here,” she ordered as she threw open a window sash.
Another mistake. A breeze tore through the open window, fanning the flames. The smoke began billowing higher, the fire moving ever closer to them.
Still Émilie refused to be daunted. She began shouting and flailing her arms.
It was an act of God that had drawn the fire brigade toward them. That had granted the men the wherewithal to create a makeshift landing space below, two windows over. Émilie had seen her uncle staring up at them from the crowd, a bleak expression on his face, as if he were resigned to their deaths.
Hang his resignation. Émilie refused to give up.
Coughing all the while, she ripped a piece of her petticoat and threw it over Bastien’s protesting head. In the nick of time, she managed to hurl him out the window, watching—her heart in her throat—as he landed in the center of the blanket, to cheers from the crowd. To her uncle’s awaiting arms. As soon as Nicodemus lifted Bastien from the center of the bedsheet, he’d turned his back on the fire. Turned his back on her.
A fit of coughing overtook Émilie in that moment. Caused her eyes to water and her body to fold in on itself. She backed away, clutching both hands to her throat, feeling the heat burn into her lungs. When she regained her bearings, precious moments had been lost.
The window was no longer an option.
The fire surrounded her on all sides.
A fresh slew of tears coursed down her cheeks. She crouched toward the floor, seeking clean air, realizing the flames would close in on her soon, hoping the smoke would choke her before the fire burned her skin.
Something rustled through the flames. A blur of motion coming from above, descending as if from the attic.
The instant before Émilie succumbed to the smoke and the despair, a set of clear, inhuman eyes—rings of blown-out black pupils surrounded by ochre—stared down at her as strong hands snatched her through the smoke.
When she woke, her lungs were burned. The skin on her right hand and along the right side of her neck was singed. It took her only a moment to agree to their terms. To agree to serve whoever had saved her. To honor the one who swore to put an end to her pain. Who vowed never to turn his back on her.
With every promise, Émilie recalled the sight of her uncle watching their home as it burned. The relief in his eyes when Sébastien landed in the center of the fire brigade. How he turned away from the burning building. Away from her.
In life, Nicodemus had never concerned himself much with her welfare. In death, he left Émilie to burn. He would burn everything to the ground if it meant saving his legacy.
Which was why Émilie took it from him. Why Émilie lied to everyone. Even the ones she purported to love.
She grinned up at Luca Grimaldi.
Everything Émilie had worked for all these years was about to come to pass. She’d already made one part of Luca’s dreams come true. She married him. At her behest, they eloped and traveled to Europe for a honeymoon. One in which Émilie had spent an inordinate amount of time speaking with some of the elder wolves in the Greek archives. The next part of Luca’s dream would never come to pass, though he did not know it.
Émilie had no interest in having children. She never had. And the notion that she simply must in order to have value as a woman had always chafed her sensibilities.
One of the most lasting lessons her uncle had taught her was the weakness of love. It was something Émilie had marveled at over the course of the last decade. Many of the men, women, vampires, werewolves, and other fey creatures she encountered were beings capable of great evil. Interestingly they were also capable of great love.