Page 105 of Incoronate
When I pulled back, I stayed close for one last breath, our foreheads nearly touching. Then I forced myself to straighten, even though every part of me wanted to stay there.
My eyes found Dominic across the room.
He was watching me with those dark, unfathomable eyes, unmoving and impossibly silent. The way he had always watched me. Like he could see every ruined, reckless, dangerous piece of me and had decided a long time ago that none of it frightened him.
I crossed the room toward him and stopped in front of him as his gaze moved over my face with that thorough attention that had always made me feel utterly seen, even in the places I tried hardest to hide.
“It needn’t be said, angel,” he murmured, as though what we were could never be summed up with mere words.
And maybe that was true, but I still needed to say it. I needed him to hear it out loud and know what he meant to me.
“Yes, it does.” A small smile touched my lips. “I know you always thought you were the dark thing in my story. That you were something to be endured, or forgiven, or kept at acareful distance. But you were never the monster I needed saving from, Dominic. You were always my sanctuary. You loved me so completely that I had no choice but to learn to do the same for myself. To stop running from what I was and start standing in it. You never once asked me to be smaller or easier to love. You just loved me exactly as I was. Every jagged edge, every contradiction, every broken and stubborn and impossible part of me.”
He lifted my hand and turned it over, pressing his lips to the inside of my palm with a reverence that made my breath catch, his eyes never leaving mine.
“I will never be able to fully explain what that did for me,” I said, needing him to know the truth. “What it built in me. You made me feel chosen instead of cursed**. Y**ou awakened things in me I didn’t even know I was capable of feeling. You terrified me and infuriated me and challenged me and made me feel more alive than I’d ever felt in my whole life. And somewhere along the way, you became the safest place I’ve ever stood.”
The bond between us hummed with something low and relentless. I felt everything he was holding back moving through it, vast and wordless, and the sheer enormity of it nearly took my breath away.
“Loving you has been the greatest privilege of my existence.” He said it without ceremony. Without softening it into something easier to hold. Just the bare, plain fact of it, like something he had been keeping safe until exactly this moment. “Every complicated, maddening, extraordinary inch of you. I will always choose you, angel. In every world. In every lifetime. In every version of whatever comes next. I will always choose you.”
I reached up with my free hand, cupped it against his jaw, and leaned in to press a slow kiss to his mouth. He stilledbeneath it the way he always did, like he was committing the exact warmth of it to somewhere permanent.
When I pulled back, his eyes stayed closed for just a moment longer than necessary.
Somewhere between one breath and the next, we found our way back to the bed the way you find your way to things that have always been inevitable. Trace first, then me, then Dominic, and the wordless rearranging of limbs until everything stilled again. I ended up where I always ended up, tucked between them, Trace’s arm draped warm across my waist, Dominic a solid presence at my back.
Nobody slept. I don’t think any of us even tried.
We just lay there in the dark while the last night before everything wore itself slowly down to morning—breathing, and close, and together in the way that didn’t require anything more than that. No more words. No more confessions. Just the three of us, the hush, and the bittersweet ache of a moment we were living fully even as we felt it slowly becoming a memory already.
I closed my eyes briefly and breathed it in.
Whatever tomorrow brought, it couldn’t take this from me. It had already happened. It was real.
And it was mine.
34. A TASTE OF HELL
There is a particular sound the world makes when something irreversible begins. It’s not a crack or a break, but a deep, violent rupture so irreparable and absolute that it feels like the earth itself has split itself in two.
I was awake before the blare had finished rolling through the walls. My body jolted upright before my mind caught up, the sheets falling away as my heart slammed against my ribs. For one fractured, disoriented second, I didn’t know what I was hearing.
Then the second blast hit, closer, harder, rattling the windowpanes and sending a fine rain of plaster dust from the ceiling—and I knew. Every nerve ending I had lit up at once.
Trace was already on his feet by the time Dominic blurred to the window, wrenching the curtain aside as a hellish orange light from somewhere below cut shadows across his face.
“We have company,” he said, and the quietness of it was somehow worse than if he had screamed it.
Footfalls smacked against the floor, too many and too fast to count before the door came off its hinges less than a second later. The Order’s men poured through the opening like an infestation of rats—dark-clad and merciless, magic already crackling between their hands in jagged blue-white arcs that scorched the air and left a copper tang on my tongue. Something hit the wall beside my head and blew out a chunk of plaster the size of my fist.
There was no time to think. There was only instinct and months of training, and the power surging up through me like a tide coming in, silver-bright through my runes and into my hands before I’d even consciously decided to reach for it.
The first man who got close went back through the doorframe the same way he’d come in. The second was already on top of me before I could reset, and I scrambled off the bed and away from him, putting the mattress between us for half a second, just long enough to find my footing, before sending him skidding back into the third with a burst of force that took them both down. After that it was just chaos. Pure, relentless, deafening chaos. Bodies thudding into walls. Magic snapping through the air. Furniture cracking apart underneath it all. Trace fought somewhere to my left like something built for war, while Dominic picked apart anyone who came within arm’s reach, a dark blur at the edges of every fight.
For a fleeting, naïve moment, I thought we could hold them off. That we actually had a chance. But I was gravely mistaken.
It was the stillness that caught my eye first.
