Chapter 87 Good Ol’ Times
Grace stood very still.
Maddox had stopped talking to look at her, the sound of the forest echoing around them. He watched Grace process the information that Matteo had been her father, and that Enzo had killed him.
She said nothing for a long moment.
Then she said, "Give me a minute."
Maddox nodded and stepped back, he sat on a fallen trunk a few feet away. He didn't look at her, which she was grateful for.
Grace moved to the base of a tree and sat down against it and pulled her knees up and stared at the ground between her feet.
Matteo.
She went back through it. All of it, from the beginning, from the first time she'd encountered him, it was the way he'd looked at her. She had noticed it then, that quality in his attention that was different from how the others looked at her. She had attributed it to kindness, to a man who was simply decent in an environment that wasn't especially full of decency, and she had been grateful for it without examining it too closely.
He had checked on her. More than once, more than the situation required. He had spoken to her like she was a person with weight and standing rather than a complication attached to his nephew. He had asked her how she was and waited for the actual answer.
And then the morning after her heat. After everything that had happened between her and Maddox. They’d gone home and Matteo had found Maddox and he had hit him.
Grace had thought she'd understood that at the time. An uncle who was protective of a girl in his nephew's care. A man with a conscience in a world that didn't always reward having one.
She understood it differently now.
He had known. He had always looked at her with recognition of bloodline, he had known what she was to him. His daughter. And when he found out what had passed between her and Maddox during her heat, the fury hadn't been general.
It had been paternal.
Grace pressed the back of her hand against her mouth and breathed through her nose.
She felt the embarrassment first, which was maybe not the most important thing she could feel but arrived before she could order her reactions. Matteo had known, and she had sat across from him and eaten and talked and accepted his kindness without any idea that she was sitting across from her own father. She had been grateful to him as a stranger. She had liked him as a stranger, and he had carried the knowledge of what she was to him the whole time and said nothing, had just continued to be kind.
The embarrassment gave way to something heavier.
She thought about his face. The last time she had seen him, the way he had looked at her. She tried to locate anything in those memories that she had somehow missed in the moment and now could see clearly, she’d found several things, small things, the way someone's eyes moved when they were holding more than they were showing.
He had been holding so much.
And then Enzo.
Enzo had killed him.
She sat with that and felt the anger come in slowly, it wasn’t in a rush, it seemed like it just settled into her bones and stayed there. Enzo, who had looked her in the face and spoken to her and slept beside her and let her believe in him in the partial, complicated way she had been letting herself believe in him. Enzo, who had answered her question about Matteo by telling her to ask Maddox, which she now replayed with new understanding. He had deflected it and at the time she had thought that was strange and had filed it away without knowing what to do with it.
She didn't know how it had happened nor did she know the circumstances, whether there had been a confrontation or whether it had been something colder than that, and she wasn't sure it changed anything. Matteo was dead and Enzo had done it.
‘Shit, I slept with the man who may or may not have murdered my father.’
She had flashbacks, they were wild, hot, full of passion, and steamy. Grace felt sick.
But underneath the anger and the grief, the embarrassment and the nausea, something else was moving that she didn't want to look at but couldn't avoid.
She didn't know if she wanted Enzo dead.
The thought arrived and she examined it honestly. She was furious at him. She would be furious at him for a long time. But wanting someone dead was a specific thing and she sat with the question of whether she wanted that. She couldn’t come up with a definite yes or even a no.
She thought about every time Enzo had stepped between her and something that would have hurt her worse. She thought about the ways he had been mean and the ways, underneath the cruelty, where something else had been visible if you knew how to look for it. She didn't understand him. She didn't understand how a person could be both those things at once, the man who killed Matteo and the man who kept saving her life.
Grace couldn’t understand it, she grabbed her hair, pulling as she gritted her teeth to keep from screaming.
"You okay?" Maddox said from the fallen trunk.
Grace looked up. ‘Do I look fine to you? Would I be pulling on my hair if everything was nice and dandy?’
“No," she looked straight at him and deadpanned.
He nodded. He didn't try to add anything to that.
She was quiet for another moment. Then she said, "When I asked Enzo what happened to Matteo, he told me to ask you."
Maddox looked at her.
"That was strange," she said. "I thought so at the time. But looking back I think it was because he felt guilty."
Maddox said nothing.
"Does that mean he's not completely without a conscience?" she said. It wasn't really a question directed at him. She was thinking out loud.
Maddox looked at the ground. "Having a conscience and acting on it are different things."
"I know," Grace said.
She sat for another moment. Then she pushed herself up off the ground and brushed the dirt from the back of her jeans and looked at Maddox.
"You said we can't stay here long," she said.
"We can't." He stood from the trunk. "They'll be looking for both of us by now and this area is too close to where they started."
"Okay." She took a breath and let it out. "Where are we going?"
Maddox looked at her for a moment with a careful expression, it was measured and had something behind it that she couldn't immediately read.
"There's a town," he said. "About four hours from here. Your grandmother lived there before she died."
Grace went still.
"That's the closest starting point we have for finding your mother," he said. "If there are any records, any people who knew her, any trail that hasn't gone completely cold, it'll be there."
Grace looked at him. "How do you know about the town?"
"Matteo told me," he said simply.
She absorbed that. Matteo had told him. Her father had told him.
"Okay," she said. "Then we go there."
She started to move and then stopped.
Maddox's expression had not changed but Grace had known him long enough to know that there was something up with him.
"What," she said.
Maddox looked at her. "There's something else."
Grace waited.
He took a moment that told her something else was significant. Then he said, "The woman you thought was your grandmother."
"Yes."
"She wasn't."
Grace stared at him. "What?"
"She wasn't your grandmother, Grace." He held her eyes and said it plainly. "She was your mother."
The forest seemed to go very quiet.
‘What is with all these reveals?’
Grace heard the words, she let her bag drop as her body moved on autopilot, she grabbed a fallen branch, and walked towards a tree.
“Grace?”
She raised the branch. Why all these secrets?! She connected the branch to the tree with a resounding sound.
‘Why did it have to be me!?’ Another hit
Was my life just a gamble? Who’s holding the cards!? Two more hits
“Grace!”
‘Don’t shout at me! You’re a part of these problems!’ Hit after hit in quick succession
“Grace!” Maddox had already crossed to her and grabbed the branch and her wrists.
“Don’t touch me!” It was the first time her voice echoed through the forest.
Maddox said nothing and let go of her wrists as he threw the branch away.
Grace took deep breaths as she walked back to where her bag was, putting her hands on her waist. She blew hair out of her face, “That's not possible," she said. "She was old. She was an old woman."
"She was a witch," Maddox said. "Age looks different."
Grace opened her mouth and closed it.
She thought about the woman. Grandma Julie was a strange one, the way she insisted she never took off that necklace and the way she always hovered. Grace remembered the game they used to play, which was called catching fae. They used to, or rather, she used to move around corners at home and pretend to grab something while her grandma just gave instructions.
Grandma Julie would always tell her to open her palm in a corner where there were some tiny cracks in the wall or floor. She would suddenly shout for her to close them and Grace would giggle then run with her palms closed as she pretended to deposit whatever was there inside a jar that would be shut tightly.
Grace thought it was harmless fun as she even enjoyed it but with the whole thing going on now and what she knows, what if she was actually catching fae?
"She's my mother," Grace said slowly as she shook away the memory, it was not a question.
"Yes," Maddox said.
“But she’s dead.”
"No, disappeared." Grace stared at him. “Years ago. He paused. "I don't know where she went. That's what we're trying to find out."
Grace stood in the middle of the forest with that information settling over her and thought about a woman she had always called grandmother.
First Matteo. Now this.
Everyone, it seemed, had known what she was and had chosen not to tell her.
She didn't say that out loud. She didn't have the capacity to unpack it right now standing in a forest with Maddox waiting beside her and people presumably looking for both of them from multiple directions.
She just stood there for one more moment with it.
Then she picked up the bag at her feet and looked at Maddox and said, "Let's go."