There she stood beside Nicholai’s chair, looking for all purposes like a carbon copy of me and having the goddamn nerve to call me her daughter. My chair legs scraped loudly on the wooden bar floor as I rose to my feet, my eyes glued to the mother who had left me to be tortured and abused in a foster home for years of my childhood.
“Darling,” she smiled at me like some sort of fucking red-haired angel. She didn’t manage to get any more words out before my fist launched itself, almost totally of its own accord, straight into her perfect fucking nose.
Cartilage crunched under my knuckles and blood burst from Bridget’s face as my fist connected, and she screamed. Good, I hoped it hurt like a bitch.
Around us, a few people gasped and stared in shock, but I paid them no attention, jabbing an accusatory finger in Bridget’s face as she clutched her nose and moaned.
“How fucking dare you?” I hissed at her, my fury so palpable that I could taste it. “How dare you show up here and call me daughter like all would be forgiven. For what? Because you forced my guardian into a binding spell which ensured he would betray me and meet with you in secret. You have a lot of fucking nerve, Bridget. A lot of fucking nerve.”
Movement alerted me to the security guards making their way over to us from their stations near the door, but I decided to save them the bother of throwing us out.
Throwing Nicholai a disgusted look, I shoved past him and through the gaping bystanders to exit the bar. A strong hand gripped onto the back of my arm as I cleared the swinging saloon doors, and that goddamn fox shifter yanked me around the side of the building to where the valet parking lot was located.
“Christina,” he snapped, giving me a stern look like I was a two-year-old throwing a tantrum in the supermarket or something. “Use your damn brain. Bridget is your only form of contact with your kind right now. Are you honestly going to let your hurt feelings get in the way of learning who you are? Who you could be?”
What he was saying made sense in the perfectly logical, unemotional world. But who was he fucking kidding? That was my biological mother! The woman who’d abandoned me on the streets with my memories wiped, and never looked back once.
“Take your damn hand off me, Nicholai,” I warned him in a low voice. “Or I swear I will do more than just break your nose as well.”
He sighed but did as instructed, removing his hand from my arm and placing his hands on his hips. “Look, I understand we don’t know each other well—” My snort cut him off and he glared at me to shut me up. “But you’re acting like a child right now. You are supposed to be the salvation of supernatural kind? Right now, all I see is a little girl who is angry at the world and lashing out. You don’t know the reasons why Bridget left you, do you?”
Lips tight, I jerked my head to acknowledge that I did not.
“Right. Well, then there is every possibility she had good reasons, isn’t there?” He raised his brows at me in a way that said he knew full well he was making sense. It was just up to my stubborn ass to accept the logic in his words.
Grinding my teeth, I held his steady gaze for a long moment. Sure, I still wanted to beat the ever-loving crap out of my egg-donor who looked so much like me it was scary... but I also badly wanted to understand what I was. The opportunity to speak with another Ban Dia, to ask questions and to learn... Nicholai was right that I’d be an idiot to pass that up in favor of my temper.
All of a sudden, my fury deflated like a popped balloon, and I sagged against the wall. “What do you even want? From what I’ve heard, Bridget has been meeting with one of my dianoch in secret for a month. Surely she could have asked him anything she needed to know?”
“I’ll let her explain. If you’ll just give her a few minutes?” he coaxed, holding his hands up defensively. “Just a few minutes and then I swear we will leave. Sound fair?”
I chewed my lip while I thought about it. What harm would a few minutes of my time do? As far as I could tell, they weren’t planning on kidnapping or killing me, and even if they were I had no doubts in my mind that I could take them. Just in case though, I reached into my pocket and held down the button that would ping my location to Wesley.
“Sure. A few minutes. But when I’m done, I’m done. I walk away, and you leave me the fuck alone. Understood?” I narrowed my eyes at him threateningly, and he nodded.
“Understood. I’ll tell her to come out.” He didn’t move from the spot where he stood in front of me. Instead, he just cocked his head to the side, and his eyes unfocused from mine for the briefest second before refocusing. “She’s on her way.”
“Uh.” Curiosity made me pause. “Did you just like... mind-speak or something?”
Nicholai frowned at me. “You can’t do that? With your bonded guardians, I mean.”
“No...” I shook my head and considered it. “I mean, I didn’t even know it was possible, so we have never tried.”
The sly shifter just smiled at me and shrugged. “Seems to me you have already benefited from giving us a few minutes. Don’t you think?”
Pursing my lips, I said nothing in response. Smug bastard. He had a point though. What else could I or my guardians do that we just had no idea was even a possibility?
The sound of high heels scraping on concrete alerted me to Bridget’s arrival moments before she rounded the corner to where Nicholai and I waited. Neither of us spoke, but instead just stared at one another.
She clearly possessed the ability to heal herself, as her nose looked totally back to normal. Hell, even her makeup was perfect once more, which suggested she’d been doing a touch up while Nicholai had been detaining me and begging me to give her a chance.
“Christina,” she greeted me eventually and took two steps closer to me. Under a slightly less emotional light, I could see the subtle differences that made us not so identical, after all.
She was shorter than me by a good few inches and much slimmer through the breasts and hips. Had it not been for the ugly-as-sin, tweed skirt suit she wore, along with pantyhose and boring pumps, I’d have said she looked like a teenager. But no self-respecting girl would be caught dead in that granny getup.
Then again, she was over three hundred years old... I dreaded to think how fashions might change for me in three hundred years’ time.
“Bridget,” I replied, trying not to spit her name like it was a curse, but that was how it ended up coming out anyway. Oh well. “You’ve got like... two minutes. So get on with it.”
Propping my foot against the wall behind me, I leaned casually and folded my arms. She needed to understand that I was under no obligation to so much as piss on her if she were on fire, let alone hear her out.
Bridget’s mouth puckered in what seemed to be anger, but she quickly recovered from it and smoothed her features into a gentle smile instead.
“Of course. Did you want to go back inside where we can sit?” she offered, and I scowled at her.
“No.” I felt like her question didn’t really need any more of a response than that.
She heaved a sigh. “Very well. I wanted to come and meet you in person to, first of all, introduce myself. I am aware you have no memories of your life before age seven, so you wouldn’t remember all of the amazing times we had together. For that, my heart breaks because I cherish those memories dearly.” She paused and pressed a hand to her chest like she was remembering those fond memories, and I frowned in confusion.
Who is she fucking kidding right now?
Glancing at Nicholai, I found a similarly confused frown on his face, too, but Bridget was continuing with her story regardless.