Page 129 of Incoronate
Instead, he turned away from us and went to the bar, opening the cabinet beneath the counter and pulling out three glasses before setting them down one after another on the wood.
I stood where I was, my mind already working, already trying to find the reasonable explanation. Maybe they’d just needed to change phones. Maybe the other one had been traced. Or maybe it broke. Things like that happened all the time when you were living on the run and had to move fast. That was all this was. A disconnected line didn’t mean anything except that things had changed while we were gone, and of course things had changed. We’d been gone long enough for leaves to pile up in the corners of my burned-down house.
It didn’t mean anything else.
Dominic grabbed a bottle without looking at the label and filled each glass with something dark and expensive looking, pouring straight from the neck without spilling a drop. I looked up and met Trace’s eyes. He hadn’t said anything either. He just held my gaze, something careful moving through his expression, as though he had been doing the same mental gymnastics I’d done.
Dominic slid Trace’s glass across the counter, then came around to where I was standing and held mine out. I took it without thinking. Didn’t question it. Didn’t slow down. I tipped the entire thing back in one swallow and set the empty glass on the counter, and not even the burn of it touched the numbness that had settled into my chest like concrete.
Dominic watched me, still holding his own glass. “We don’t know anything yet,” he reminded me, his eyes trackingmy every movement. “If they had to move quickly, changing numbers would have been the first thing my brother did.”
“I know,” I said.
“Then stop looking like that.”
“I’m not looking like anything.”
I could tell by the slight lift of his eyebrow that he disagreed, but he at least had the courtesy not to call me on it.
Trace was quiet for a beat, watching the two of us, then looked at Dominic. “Do you have a TV in this place?” he asked, his drink still untouched on the counter.
Dominic blinked at him. “In the den. Why?”
“Why do you think?” He was already moving, pushing away from the counter and heading for the corridor. “So we can figure out how long we’ve actually been gone,” he said over his shoulder without looking back.
I didn’t move. I didn’t need to. I already knew that whatever number the TV gave us wasn’t going to be small enough to make any of this okay. Ignored the dread behind my ribs, I pulled in a breath and replayed all the reasonable explanations for the disconnected line, the ones that ended with Tessa picking up a new phone somewhere on the road and Gabriel having a plan and Ares being safe and sound. The ones where all of this could be easily explained away. I was good at that. I’d had a lot of practice.
Dominic didn’t follow him either. Instead, his dark eyes came back to me, moving over my face with that slow, taking-apart quality he had, like he was cataloguing every crack before deciding which one needed shoring up first.
“They could have simply gotten a new burner,” he said at last, his voice low and tempered. “It’s what I would have done.”
“Even without a reason?” I challenged, refusing to say the rest of it out loud. That even if that were the case, there had to have been a really good reason for them to change phones.
And something told me that reason had everything to do with the Order.
“We’ll find them,” he said, holding my gaze.
I didn’t get a chance to respond.
Trace reappeared in the doorway to the living room, and one look at his face told me everything I needed to know. Or rather everything I didn’t want to know. It was written all over his face. The grim set of his jaw, the way his eyes found mine and held them with the careful steadiness of someone trying to figure out how to say something without making it worse. Which meant it was worse.
Much worse.
He opened his mouth just as an arm shot around his throat from behind. He was yanked backward into the corridor, a wooden stake pressing up under his ribs before any of us had a chance to even react.
“Who sent you?” hissed a woman from behind him.
I was already moving, my pulse roaring in my ears as I rounded the bar and crossed the room in three steps, my hand going to the Sword of Angelus on instinct, steel already half out of the sheath as Trace twisted out of her hold.
And then I stopped dead in my tracks.
“Jackie?”
“Jemma?” Her voice broke on my name, as though she couldn’t remember how to say it anymore.
She was staring at me the way people stare at things that are not supposed to be there anymore. Like I’d just crawled out of a grave she’d already filled in, grieved over, and learned to live without. The weapon dropped to her side. The color drained completely from her face, and her eyes, my mother’seyes, which I had never once in my life seen look anything close to undone, were glassy and wide and absolutely certain they were looking at something impossible.
It lasted only a second before her expression crumbled.
