Chapter 909: Elena’s Grand Plans
Chapter 909: Elena’s Grand Plans
A/N:Reread the last Chapter before this, I have changed it a bit since I had missed the Chapter. If you hadn’t read it on 29th June.
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"Noted, my love," the goddess called sweetly after her retreating daughter, without an ounce of remorse, and tucked herself contentedly back into the harbour of Phei’s arms as though she had never moved at all.
And Elena, three strides down away with her pout still firmly mounted for the benefit of any watching eyes, let it slip from her face the instant her back was turned to them.
Because the pout was easy, a theatre, and Elena had been doing theatre her whole life — the spoiled princess and the daughter who sulked and stamped and got underfoot.
It was a comfortable costume and it asked nothing of her, and that was precisely why she’d worn it so long: nobody guarded their flank against a houseplant.
But she’d seen the thing in that doorway. Not the kissing — gods, no, she would be requiring a great deal of therapy and possibly a small exorcism to unsee the kissing, and she made a private note to bill her mother for both — but the otherthing:
The way her mother, the immovable Empress of Ashford House, the woman who had never once in Elena’s entire life looked unguarded, who had reduced grown people to stammering apology with a single lifted eyebrow, had melted into that boy like ice surrendering to a warm hand.
Elena had watched her mother’s spine give and decades of glacial her composure quietly set itself down at the feet of a teenage boy in folded shirtsleeves, and felt the floor of her entire understanding of the world tilt a few degrees.
So. That was happening. Cool. Everything was fine. She was thrilled for them.
And Elena, who knew a great many things she was not supposed to know — who had made a lifelong art of being underestimated in rooms full of people too important to notice her listening — had done the arithmetic some time ago.
He was the future.
The thing the whole rotten Legacy machine was beginning to circle with such poorly disguised hunger. Sierra had bent. Delilah had bent. Her own mother had just bent in a hotel doorway in front of her.
The smart play — the only play, really, for a girl who intended to still be standing when the Destined Day finished rearranging the board — was not to resent it.
It was to belong to it. Fully. Before the rush.
But belonging had a price, and Elena had no intention of buying her way in with sulks and proximity and the leftover affection owed to a friend’s daughter. That was the houseplant’s portion. No.
She would walk in carrying something; something he needed and didn’t have that would make him look at her — really look, the way he looked at the women who’d earned it — and understand, all at once, that the spoiled little Ashford princess had been the most useful person in the building the entire time.
She knew exactly what that something was. Had known for a while and she had been turning it over in the dark for nights, deciding when to spend it.
And she did not intend to stop at merely belonging.
That was the part none of them had clocked yet — not Sierra with her cold composure, not Delilah, not Maddie that delighted lunatic, not even her own mother, who had just demonstrated with clarity exactly how thoroughly a clever woman could be undone by good shoulders and a kind voice.
They were all so busy loving him. So busy melting, like a row of very expensive candles left too near the hearth.
Each of them content, it seemed, to be one more devoted satellite in the long bright orbit around the dragon.
Elena had watched them arrange themselves into that constellation and felt only a cool, private astonishment that not one of these brilliant, terrifying women had looked up from gazing adoringly at him long enough to ask the single obvious question.
’Who ran it?’
A circle this large, this powerful, this stuffed to bursting with dangerous women carrying dangerous histories and even more dangerous futures — it would need a hand at the centre of it that wasn’t his.
He could not possibly manage them all and the Legacy war and the coming Day and the entire groaning weight of whatever cosmic horror he was busy becoming.
The man could barely manage to leave a building without acquiring a new woman or a new enemy, frequently both, occasionally the same person.
’He’d need a Queen.’
Someone to hold the whole improbable circus together and to settle the squabbles, guard the flanks, keep the homicidal ones pointed at the correct targets, and know precisely where every body in the orbit was buried, ideally because she’d helped bury several of them herself.
The keystone. Pull her, and the whole pretty arch comes down on everyone’s heads.
Sierra thought she was first among them. Her mother untouchable in Phei’s life and didn’t really care who was a Queen or if there was none at all.
Maddie, bless her, did not appear to think in the conventional sense at all.
They were all, Elena reflected with a small private surge of contempt and genuine affection in roughly equal measure, thinking far, far too small — squabbling over who got to sit closest to the sun while entirely failing to notice the chair had no one in it.
She wasn’t going to be a satellite.
She was going to be the throne the satellites circled.
And the lovely part — the genuinely delicious part — was that every last one of them would help her up onto it without ever once realising they’d done it, because who on earth feels threatened by the Little Virgin Succubus who doesn’t talk to do anything major in them and who isn’t even his woman yet?
A slow smile spread across her face, nothing at all like the pout.
’Soon,’ she thought, and quickened her step toward the elevators. ’Very soon, dragon. And you won’t see it coming from me — not the gift, and certainly not the rest of it. That’s rather the entire point.’
Behind her, faintly, she heard her mother laugh at something he had said — that low, melted, new laugh — and Elena’s smile only widened.
’Enjoy it, Mother. Truly. Savour the honeymoon.’
Somebody competent was going to have to run this disaster, and it certainly wasn’t going to be the woman who liquefied in a doorway over him, he needed a Queen not someone love-sick.