Page 131 of Incoronate
My legs gave out so suddenly that there was nothing I could do but go with them. I never made it to the ground though. An arm came around my waist from behind, pulling me back against a chest that didn’t budge. Dominic’s hand pressed flat against my ribs and held me there, anchoring me to the room, to his body, to something solid while the rest of the world came apart at the seams around me.
Two years?
We’d been gone for two years?
“How is that possible?” I gasped, my hand curling around Dominic’s forearm as the room tilted and swayed around me. I wasn’t even sure I’d asked the question out loud.
I wasn’t even sure I was standing on my own two feet.
“Are you absolutely certain?” Dominic’s voice came from somewhere above me, low and controlled, but I could feel the tension coiled through the arm still wrapped around me. “Two years. As in 730 days.”
“It’s not something I would forget,” she said without hesitation. Just the flat, worn certainty of someone who had been counting days for a very long time.
They said something else after that. Both of them. Maybe Trace too. But the words stopped reaching me.
Their mouths were moving and I could see it happening but the sound had gone strange and distant, like hearing voices through water. There was a ringing in my ears that kept climbing, and underneath it one single thought that my mind kept throwing itself against and couldn’t get past.
Two years.Two fucking years. How could two years have passed? We’d been gone for a day. Two at most. I’d known time moved differently in Sanguinarium, but I’d thought days, maybe weeks. Not this. Not years. Not two of them, gone and buried while we were trapped in that rust-colored hellscape with no idea what was happening on the other side of the walls.
And if two years had passed in this world, then that meant they’d had two years.
Two years to find Tessa. Two years to find Gabriel. Two years to find Ares.
Panic detonated in my chest as my mind finally, fully caught up.
“Where are they?” I said, louder than I meant to, loud enough that Dominic’s arm tightened around me in response. “Where are Tessa and Gabriel and Ares?”
Jaqueline’s expression shuttered. One moment it was open and the next everything in her face just…closed. The shock, the relief, the anger, all of it pulling tight behind her eyes until there was nothing left but a look I had never seen from her before.
Not from my Jacqueline Morningstar. Not from the woman who had survived everything this life had thrown at her without flinching. Not from someone who had stood in the path of demons and darkness and death and never once let any of it reach her face.
Until now.
And the second I saw it, my whole entire world folded in on itself.
“Are they alive?” I screamed, the words tearing out of me ragged and desperate. “Answer me, Jackie! Are they alive?”
She looked at me the way you looked at someone you loved when you were about to break them in half.
“No, baby,” she said, her voice cracking open on the last word as the tears finally came. “They’re not.”
The sound that left me wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t a sob. It was something that had no name, something that lived below language, below thought, in the oldest and most animal part of me that understood only loss. It came up from somewhere I hadn’t known existed and tore through me on its way out, leaving nothing but ruin in its wake.
Dominic’s arms locked around me, both of them, holding me tightly as though he were the only thing still keeping me intact, but I couldn’t feel it. I couldn’t feel anything except a chasm so deep and total and obliterating it had its own gravity, pulling everything inward, collapsing every wall I had ever built around myself in one silent, catastrophic implosion.
My sister was gone.
Gabriel was gone.
Ares was gone.
They’d been ripped from this world while I was on the outside of it, eating mystery food off a slab of dark stone and bargaining with myself that it would be fine. That I would get back in time. That I would fix it.
But I didn’t fix it. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when the house burned. I wasn’t there when the Order came for them. I wasn’t there for any of it. They were gone and there wasn’t any amount of devil blood or magic that would ever change that.
Not this time.
The grief didn’t hit me in waves. It arrived all at once, a total and ruinous flood that left no room for breath or thought or anything at all. It filled every corner of me and kept filling, past the point of capacity, past the point of endurance, past every version of myself I had ever survived before.
