Sins of the Father (The Guardians Series 2 Book 4), page 2
Scarlett’s head swam, filled with the feel and taste of Sam, her heart pounding against her ribs as she held on. She wanted to stay in that moment forever, but she knew she couldn’t because there was still too much they needed to say. She pulled back with a sigh of regret.
“Sam.” She glanced up at him to find him watching her patiently with those deep blue eyes. “If we’re going to be together then you have to promise me something.”
He didn’t say anything, just waited for her to continue. “You can’t just disappear on me for two thousand years at a time because you think it’s what’s best for me. I’m not going to let you just jump in and out of our daughter’s life, absent for years at a time. I won’t let you do that to her.”
“Scarlett, I swear—”
“No more lies, Sam,” she interrupted him. “No more evasions, the truth. You owe me that much.”
He stared at her quietly, his eyes searching hers, then finally he nodded. “The truth.”
“All of it?” she replied.
“All of it.” He nodded again. “I came here tonight with the intention of telling you everything and begging your forgiveness.”
“You’re already forgiven, no begging required,” she answered. “So you might as well tell me the rest.”
“There’s so much to say.” He blew out a breath. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“The beginning might be a good place,” she replied.
He took her hand and led her across the room so she could sit comfortably on the end of the bed, conscious of the fact her body must be heavy and aching from carrying their child.
Their child.
His stomach tightened and he felt an unexpected and overwhelming rush of pleasure at the thought of his child growing inside her.
“Sam?” She interrupted his thoughts.
“Sorry.” He smiled. “I just… you’re so beautiful.” He sank down onto the bed and ran his palm gently over the swell of her belly. “I just never thought I’d feel this way.” His brow folded into a frown. “If my father finds out about her, he’ll stop at nothing to kill her,” Sam murmured the words aloud, knowing that Scarlett had probably already come to the same conclusion. Even though she had no idea how obsessed his father was with Sam providing him with a grandchild and heir, there was no way he would accept a child that was not only female but half angel. “I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect her,” he told Scarlett vehemently.
“We will do whatever it takes to protect her,” she told him firmly, placing great emphasis on the ‘we’. “Now start talking.”
“Do you remember when we first met?” he began softly, his eyes distant.
“Of course, I do,” she murmured.
“I was so young at the time,” Sam continued. “So afraid of my father back then. When he ordered me to befriend you so he could figure out what you knew about your mother and the book of the heavens, I didn’t dare disobey him.” He paused and turned to look at her quietly. “I never expected to fall in love with you.”
She lifted her hand and stroked his jaw gently.
“That was the moment everything changed, it opened my eyes to what was going on around me.” He stared at the wall opposite as he cast his mind back. “I began to question everything and that’s when I discovered what my father had done to my mother.”
“You never talked about her,” Scarlett replied quietly.
“I never knew her.” He shook his head. “I have no memory of her at all. I don’t even know what she looked like. You know how it is with my people. There is no such thing as marriage, the males are assigned breeding partners according to their rank and importance. Once the female has successfully birthed a male child, they are returned to the women’s quarters. If they birth a female child, the child is sent back also to grow up and in turn become a breeding partner herself once she reaches sexual maturity.”
“It’s barbaric,” Scarlett replied in disgust.
“I know,” Sam agreed. “And believe me, we’re not the only ones who think so.”
“What happened to your mother?” she asked gently.
“He had her executed,” Sam said flatly, drawing a sharp intake of air from Scarlett. “He didn’t want her giving birth to any other child that could potentially be a half sibling to me. He wanted his blood line kept as pure and unchallenged as possible.”
“What did you do when you found out?” She frowned.
“I confronted him.” Sam sighed. “For all the good it did me. He didn’t even deny it. He wasn’t even sorry.” He swallowed uncomfortably, even after all these years he still hadn’t come to terms with it. “My father was not pleased that I challenged him, and he was pushing me to start pressuring you for more information. When I refused, he punished me by trapping me in the otherworld. His version of sending me to my room I suppose. Time passes differently in the otherworld. He left me to stew on our disagreement, assuming I’d come to my senses and apologize.”
“I’m guessing that didn’t happen.” Her mouth curved into a half smile.
“Ironically, it was him sending me to the otherworld that set in motion a chain of events that set me on my path.”
“What happened in the otherworld?” she asked curiously.
“I met Olivia for the first time.” He turned to Scarlett and smiled.
“Olivia?” Her eyes widened in surprise. “But how is that possible?”
“I told you, time doesn’t work the same way in the otherworld, it’s fluid, and the past and future as we know them don’t exist there,” Sam explained. “Hades had sent her to the otherworld to find Theo, who’d accidentally been trapped when they closed a gateway between Mercy and the Spirit world. Olivia’s mother, Isabel, and a demon named Nathaniel were stalking through the Underworld destroying crossroads, and the damage they caused riccoched up through the otherworld, causing the reality we were trapped in to collapse into the void. Olivia, Theo, and I managed to escape, but the only place we could go was into the Underworld itself.”
“The Underworld?” Scarlett’s eyes widened. “But you’re heaven born, being trapped for any length of time in the Underworld would have been like poison to you.”
“Don’t I know it,” he replied ruefully. “It made me sick as hell, and if it hadn’t been for Hades, I wouldn’t have made it out.”
“Hades?” she whispered.
“Yes, we’ve crossed paths more than once.” He nodded. “You should’ve been at Olivia and Theo’s wedding, half the Underworld emptied out to help them celebrate.”
“So I’ve heard,” Scarlett murmured as she studied him.
“I inadvertently got caught up in their little quest,” Sam continued. “It was because of Olivia I began to suspect that it wasn’t just about you, your mother, and the Book of the Heavens. It was about all the books. Something was happening, something way bigger than the power struggle in heaven between my father and Azariel. Olivia’s mother and the demon were looking for the hell book. Infernum was waking and it was calling out for its Guardian.”
“Olivia,” Scarlett murmured thoughtfully.
“We didn’t know it at the time.” Sam shook his head. “We were just trying to stop the demon getting his hands on it. We were accidentally thrown through time to 17th Century Salem, unfortunately I was inadvertently infected with demon fire.”
“Holy crap, Sam.” Scarlett sighed. “You’re just a magnet for bad luck, aren’t you?”
“Apparently.” He nodded. “Well, to cut a long story short, I ended up bringing Theo’s sister, Temperance, back to Mercy and in the process figured out how to travel through time. The problem was, I was pretty sick. I’d barely made it out of the Underworld. Being infected with demon fire and then burning up most of my energy jumping through time for the first time meant I barely had enough strength to make it back to Heaven.”
“How the hell did you explain that to your father?” Scarlett frowned.
“Carefully.” He grimaced. “Turns out my father was aware that the pocket of reality he’d locked me in, in the otherworld, had collapsed. He’d been frantically looking for me, thinking I’d been lost to the void.”
“You could’ve just disappeared.” Scarlett realized. “At that point, he already thought you were dead. You could’ve not returned, and he wouldn’t have known you were still alive. You could’ve been free of him.”
“I know,” he replied quietly, as he turned to look at her. “I came back for you.”
“Sam,” she whispered.
“I managed to convince my father I’d escaped the void by fleeing into the Underworld, which accounted for my sickness. He didn’t apologize for locking me in the Otherworld in the first place, and I was just as happy for him to drop the subject. He had no idea he’d actually done me a favor. I’d had my eyes opened, and I wanted to know more.”
“I think I remember that.” Scarlett frowned as she tried to think back. “I remember you being missing for days and when you turned up you didn’t look well, but you didn’t want to talk about it. I figured it was another one of your father’s punishments, and so I didn’t say anything.”
Sam nodded in agreement. “I knew I wouldn’t fool you. I’d had some healing, but it was a lower-level healer I’d paid to keep their mouth shut about the demon fire. The problem was their skill level wasn’t enough to completely purge it from my system. So I learned to live with it, but that only complicated matters recently when I took Armand’s Oubli, and Ash tortured me with that blue shit the angels are so fond of.”
“Sam.” She frowned at him thoughtfully. “Your body shouldn’t have been able to take so much punishment. There’s no way an ordinary sentinel could withstand long-term demon fire poisoning, let alone everything else,” she mused, her eyes filled with confusion. “What is it about you that makes you different from the others?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I just know that I’m grateful for it. After I’d recovered enough, I went back to 1695. Olivia and Theo had made it out of Salem and back to their own time, but that was when I discovered Elias clawing his way out of his grave, although he was known as Logan Beckett back then.”
“My god, Sam.” She let out a small huff of a laugh. “You weren’t kidding when you said you had a lot to tell me.”
“And I’ve barely scratched the surface,” he warned her. “I stashed Elias somewhere safe, where no one would recognize him, and I headed back to heaven. Only when I got there I discovered Ash had made his play. He’d faked his death, framed you, and run off with the Sphere.”
“You knew he wasn’t dead?” Scarlett’s eyes narrowed slightly in confusion as she watched him.
“Oh, please,” Sam scoffed in disgust. “Anyone with eyes could see there wasn’t enough evidence against you. They couldn’t even prove that Ash was dead without a body, but I knew Azariel and my father would seize this chance to get their hands on you. I’d run out of time. I enlisted Julien and Tyrel to help me get you out of there. They were the only two I trusted.”
“Tyrel?” Scarlett repeated, as a series of delirious and pain filled images filled her mind. “He was there,” she muttered. “He carried me from the cell and helped me escape after your father…” Her voice trailed off as she swallowed back the painful memories.
“Yes,” Sam replied quietly. “He helped get you out when I couldn’t, and it wasn’t the first time. I dropped you down in the middle of nowhere two thousand years into the past because it was the only place I knew they couldn’t find you. I had to return before I was missed. Heaven was in an uproar with your escape. Azariel and my father were furious, each blaming the other, but I knew something else was going on, something far bigger than your mother hiding the book of the heavens, and I needed time to figure out what that was. Between us, Julien, Tyrel, and I faked my death and got Julien exiled to Earth to watch over you while Tyrel remained in heaven to be our eyes and ears.”
“That still doesn’t explain the last conversation we had.” She stared at him.
“I told you,” he replied, his voice filled with regret. “I was young and stupid, and panicking. I thought I’d be able to protect you better by keeping my distance. I thought you’d be able to build a life without me.”
“Then you obviously didn’t know me as well as you thought you did.” She frowned.
“You have no idea how many times I’ve wished I could go back and do things differently,” he whispered.
Scarlett released a long, slow breath and shook her head. “We can’t change the past,” she murmured. “We can only try and move forward.” She looked up at him and saw the regret reflected in his eyes. “Tell me what happened next.”
“I went back to Salem to deal with Elias,” Sam replied. “He wasn’t doing well, and he couldn’t understand how or why he’d been brought back from the dead.”
There was something in Sam’s voice that had a sneaky suspicion creeping in.
“You think you know, don’t you?” she guessed. “You think you know how he was brought back.”
“There’s only one person I know of that has the power to bring back a human form with its soul fully intact.”
“Who?” she asked curiously.
He stared at her for a moment. “Metatron,” he finally answered.
“Metatron?” She blinked slowly. “But why?”
“You’d have to ask him that,” Sam replied.
“Have you said anything to Elias?” She frowned.
“No.” He shook his head. “Because I don’t know for certain.”
Scarlett went quiet as she stared thoughtfully at her feet. “Metatron was there,” she murmured quietly after a moment. “The others didn’t have the power to open the seals on Lucifer’s cell where they were holding me, not without the key, which I know Azariel has. Metatron was the only one who could’ve opened that cell. He carried me to Earth, he brought me to Olivia, and told me to stay with her where I’d be safe.”
“I know,” Sam answered quietly.
“What?” She asked when she sensed him holding something back.
“I’m also pretty sure that Metatron was the one who made a deal with the Loa Samedi to bring your soul back from the Crossroad after Ash stabbed you.”
“No,” she whispered faintly in disbelief. “I don’t…” She shook her head in denial. “Metatron is the voice of God. He wouldn’t…”
“Wouldn’t do anything without God’s express instructions?” Sam finished for her.
“No.” She shook her head, pushing herself up from the end of the bed and pacing toward the window. “It’s not possible.”
“Are you so sure about that?” Sam rose from the bed slowly and followed her across the room, stopping just behind her. “Legend says God himself chose your mother to protect the book. He must’ve seen what was going to happen between Azariel and my father.”
“He didn’t stop them though, did he?” Scarlett replied angrily. “He didn’t make them toe the line. He didn’t curb their authority. He didn’t stop them from torturing my mother and casting her down into purgatory. He ran away like everyone else, and now I’m supposed to pick up the pieces and pay the price, just like my mother did? I told you, I’ve told all of them a million times. I don’t know where the book is. I don’t know what she did with it, and I sure as hell don’t want the responsibility of trying to keep it out of Azariel’s or Thomas’s hands.”
“I don’t think you’re just supposed to keep it safe, Scarlett,” Sam said quietly.
“No,” she denied flatly, as her eyes filled with furious tears. “I’m not Caelum’s Guardian. I don’t want that responsibility.”
He pulled her in close and wrapped his arms around her as the first tears began to fall. He could feel the wetness soaking through his shirt as he rocked her gently, stroking her hair,
“I just want to be free,” she whispered. “Why can’t they just let me go? Why do they hate me so much?”
“Come on.” He pulled her gently toward the bed. “It’s late. We’ve talked enough for one night. You need to rest.”
She let him tuck her into bed expecting him to disappear once again, but instead, he kicked off his shoes and climbed into bed beside her, sliding down behind her and pulling her in close, so she spooned against his chest.
“Are you going to still be here when I wake?” she asked quietly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he rumbled against her ear, as he breathed in the scent of her hair. “Go to sleep, Scarlett.”
She was fighting it, even after switching out the light and laying together in the darkness her body was tense, convinced that as soon as she closed her eyes he would leave again. He wrapped his arms around her, stroking her belly soothingly as he felt their daughter once again shift restlessly beneath his palm, as if she could somehow read her mother’s mood.
He held them both, cradling them in his arms like they were the most precious things in the world. He felt it when she finally relaxed enough to let go and slid seamlessly into sleep. Their daughter took a little while longer, kicking and nudging against his palm as he fell hopelessly in love with a tiny little being he’d not even yet seen.
Sleep would not come to him as easily. Instead, he lay in the dark, holding them in his arms, and thinking about the future. The whole world had shifted on its axis. Scarlett had no idea what was coming in the days ahead of them, but she would. There was no way he could keep it from her. She deserved the truth, even if it hurt her. All he knew was that everything he loved was wrapped up in his arms, and he would tear the world apart before he let any harm come to them.
2
Scarlett stretched and yawned, awkwardly rolling over onto her back, her hand skimming the cool sheets beside her. She tilted her head and opened her eyes to confirm what she already knew. The bed was empty, Sam was gone.
She tried to roll back onto her side but as she did, a sharp pain seared through her shoulder, her damaged wing, which was still tucked away, was spasming and cramping. Pushing herself up shakily from the bed, she swung her legs over the side, sitting at the edge of the bed as she tried to breathe through the intense pain.
