Page 1 of Incoronate
THE HOLLOWING
The first thing that registered was the sepulchral silence. It filled the room completely, squeezing in on all sides, yet it didn’t settle around me the way it should have. It wasn’t peaceful or restorative, the kind that followed a long, dreamless sleep. It felt hollow, as though something vital had been cut out of me.
Sensation came next, returning to me in fragments as though it were slotting back into place piece by piece. The solid press of cushions beneath my back. The weight of my own body, cumbersome and slow to respond. The feel of my chest rising and falling in steady, automatic rhythms that somehow felt misaligned; the cadence overlapping in a way that made it hard to tell where one beat ended and the next one began.
I opened my eyes and blinked up at the living room ceiling.
Familiar shadows stretched across the beams as the sound of flames licking at the firewood hissed and snapped through the air. Everything was unchanged, exactly as it had always been, and yet none of it rooted me. My awareness kept slipping, catching a fraction too late, as if my body and mind were no longer moving at the same speed. As if my thoughts had been pulled too far apart and then stitched back together incorrectly.
I lay there motionless, waiting for pain or panic to surface, for some delayed reaction to crash through now that I was fully conscious, but neither came.
The last things I remembered before everything went dark came to me in uneven flashes. Temple. The Sang Noir. William’s cold, deliberate voice. Sigils burning across the flooraround me. The chanting. The pressure building inward until everything tore apart.
I’d ported back home to the Blackburn Estate, straight into the arms of the first boy I’d ever loved, already knowing the nightmare I’d faced at Temple wasn’t over. The voices had followed me back—barbed, invasive chatter that had crowded my head all at once, overwhelming my mind until thought itself gave out under the crushing weight of it. There had been too many demands. Too much noise. Too much pain for one person to bear. It had taken everything I had just to stay inside my own head, and in the end, even that hadn’t been enough.
But it was quiet again now.Too quiet. Only a deafening silence that didn’t feel natural or safe.
“You’re awake.” The sound of Trace’s baritone rippled over my skin like a current.
I turned my head and faced him, swallowing past the dryness in my throat.
Azure blue eyes, wrought with tension and worry, locked onto mine. He sat perched on the edge of the coffee table beside me with his shoulders hunched forward and his hands clasped tightly between his knees as though he hadn’t moved a muscle in hours.
The posture was all wrong for him. It was too small and hopeless, too afraid, like he thought he was about to lose me and was already trying to figure out how to survive it.
“How are you feeling?” he asked, his eyes combing over my face, pausing on my eyes, my mouth, my cheeks, tracking every change as it happened.
“I’m okay,” I rasped and then winced as my throat scraped against the words.
It felt like I’d been screaming for hours. Only I couldn’t seem to remember screaming at all.
“I’m afraid we’re going to need a better assessment than that, love.”
I peered over Trace’s shoulder at the sound of Dominic’s voice and met his eyes. He was standing by the mantle with his hands in his pockets and a lopsided smile playing at the corner of his mouth. Despite the easy way he wore it, I knew he wasn’t nearly as relaxed as he wanted me to believe he was. He was doing that thing he always did—holding himself so painstakingly composed that you’d almost miss how close to the edge he actually was.
But I could see straight through it.
“Nothing’s broken,” I offered lightly, even if that was only true in the strictly physical sense.
He clicked his tongue at me. “That’s a remarkably low bar, angel, even for you. Forgive me if I find it less than reassuring.”
For a brief, fleeting moment, the sound of their voices grounded me, just as it always had, but the feeling didn’t last. The comfort only went skin-deep, burning through me too quickly for me to hold onto and leaving an emptiness in the space where the warmth should have been. Something about it just didn’t feel right.
Then again, nothing did.
“How long was I asleep?” I asked as I tried to push myself upright.
Every muscle in my body protested the movement, but I promptly schooled my features before anything could show. The last thing I wanted was to give them more reason to worry about me.
“It’s been a while,” answered Trace as he reached out to steady me, holding my arm and supporting my back as he carefully helped me sit up. “A few hours.” The way he said it made it sound as though he’d lost track of time altogether.
I dragged my hands through my hair, my fingers catching at the roots before dropping back to my lap as Dominic padded over to the bar cart and poured two glasses of something dark and expensive looking.
“Do you remember what happened?” asked Trace, drawing my attention back to him.
