Page 55 of Bound

Just in time, she clamped a brutal hand over her gasping mouth. Fortunately, Paipanne moved up and lent much-needed support around her opposite elbow. Without it, she would have likely collapsed to the floor in a tearful clump instead of being able to lower to it on trembling knees.

“Maimanne.” She whispered it this time, yearning to eviscerate herself for the testy impatience of her previous shouts. So long before this moment, as she gaped at the sharp gashes surrounding her mother’s eyes. The marks, so painful to look at, were eerily similar to the scarred gashes across the woman’s wrists. “Mother. It is me. Truly. I…I am here. I…”

She faltered, not knowing what else to say. She also learned, with scorching swiftness, that words were impossible when the air felt like glass. Paipanne seemed to commiserate, his eyes soft but his chest pumping hard. Jayd watched, oddly transfixed, as he stepped behind the chaise’s headboard. Maimanne tracked her head toward his movement.

Tracked it.

But not seeing it.

She gulped. It felt like a pier piling shoved down her throat. She looked harder, wondering if she had just been observing a trick of the light across Maimanne’s gaze. No such fortune. Her mother was truly this messed up—and her most horrifying instincts, supported by Paipanne’s tension, kept conveying it had been self-inflicted.

“Yes, Xaria,” her father murmured. “She is right here, my raismette. Try to look at her, darling. Just for a moment.”

Maimanne gingerly turned her head. Jayd slid her hand down and wrapped it with her mother’s. She tried but failed to ignore the fresher marks across Maimanne’s closer wrist.

Holy Creator on high.

No wonder she had never been summoned that night. And that Maimanne had failed to reach out at all.

She had been fighting for her life.

More clearly, someone else had fought to preserve it first.

When she looked up once more, she was certain who that person was.

Thank you, Paipanne. Thank you so much.

His gaze glistened, indicating he received and treasured her tacit message. She dropped her own teary gaze back down. But the haze of her emotion was only a part of the new filter through which she now beheld her mother.

In her heart, the woman had always held a place of special awe. Xaria Cimarron carried herself like Elizabeth Windsor, groomed herself like Grace Kelly, and owned every room into which she walked like a combination of Beyonce, Aretha, and Gaga at once. Jayd constantly struggled to believe the woman’s DNA ran in her veins—yes, even in this moment, when so much had changed. When the woman returned Jayd’s hold as if it were her last purchase before tumbling over a cliff. When she forced her gaze open with a small wince, clearly straining to see past the healing ointments that fogged her eyes.

“My beautiful girl,” she rasped, stretching out her other hand to feel along the side of Jayd’s face. “It is you. What on earth did you do to your hair?”

The demand was as beautiful as a ballad from any of the divas she had just evoked. “Oh, it is still here.” With a nervous laugh, she tugged at her damp ends. “Just…less of it.”

Maimanne fingered the spikes too. They were probably the color of peacock quills by now. Just as swiftly, the woman jerked her head in an unintelligible way. Jayd braced herself for the ensuing critique.

“I…like it.”

Jayd fought whiplash. “You—ermmm—do?”

“Yes,” Maimanne said. “But not half as much as I love you.”

And now whiplash was the least of her concerns. She had no idea what this reactive feeling was, bringing on the strange wrench of her stomach and the dizzying heat to her cheeks. It was certainly not unpleasant.

“You—um—uh, all right,” she finally managed in a strained sough.

“I should have told you so before now,” Maimanne blurted. “So many times, Jayd Dawne…I should have told you!”

“Ssshhh now.” Paipanne stroked the side of her neck with a massive thumb. “You are telling her now, Xaria. And she hears you.”

“I do.” Jayd pressed a kiss into a puddle of her own tears along the back of her mother’s hand. “Every syllable. Maimanne, please do not—”

“But if I had said them sooner, you never would have doubted their truth. You never would have run away to look for that wretch who gave you nothing. Who gave me nothing, save the gift of you.” She switched her touch from Jayd’s face to her own, only now her fingers were self-punishing claws. “I never should have looked at him. Not even once. I never should have bought his despicable illusion. I never could have believed his beauty was as thin as his morality!”

“Maimanne! Stop! Please!” Jayd joined her father in fighting Maimanne’s shocking strength, but the woman kept plucking at her eye socket as if needing to yank the organ all the way out. “He is not worth your grief by half! By even less!”

She almost plowed on to relay how Louis LaBarre had matured past the point of anything close to it, but what solace would that bring? Maimanne’s mind had seemingly stop-framed on her seducer from twenty-five years ago, not the skeletal addict she and Brickham had met back in Paris. Worse, even those distant memories had brought Arcadia’s queen mother to today’s present mess—where she loathed the concept of LaBarre so much, she had tried gouging out her eyes because of it.