Page 132 of Incoronate
And this time, I let it drown me.
43. PROVIDENCE REMAINS
Somewhere between the living room and Dominic’s bed, I lost a few hours. One moment I was in the living room with the storm breaking against the windows and my mother’s voice still ringing in my ears, and then somehow I was here, curled on my side in the center of his bed, my knees drawn up to my chest and my hands pressed together under my cheek like I was praying.
As if that had ever done me any good.
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there but I knew it was long enough for the storm to settle. Long enough for crying to burn itself out and my throat to go raw and my body to stop feeling like something that belonged to me.
My eyes still hurt. They’d been hurting for hours—swollen and raw and scraped hollow from the inside out, the skin around them tight and tender in a way that told me I’d been crying long after I thought I’d run out of anything left to cry with. I hadn’t even felt it happening. That was the worst part. The grief had moved through me so completely that at some point it had stopped feeling like feeling at all and started feeling like weather. Like something happening to me from the outside.
Like I was just standing in it, getting rained on, with no reason to believe it was ever going to stop.
And it didn’t. Not for a long time.
The hours came and went without sound or ceremony, indifferent to the audacity of continuing at all. Trace and Dominic had been beside me the whole time, consoling me, taking turns saying things that never came through.
I couldn’t hear them through my grief, but I could feel it the way you felt sunlight through closed curtains, present and close, but not quite reaching. At some point one of them had been sitting against the headboard with a hand in my hair. At another point the other had been at the edge of the bed, his voice low and patient, with enough worry in it that it hurt to register even through the fog.
Please eat something.
Talk to us.
Look at me, angel. Please look at me.
But I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I had nothing to give them, and nothing left to receive. There was only this emptiness, deep and hollow and endless, a space inside my chest so wide it felt like the rest of me was just echoing around it. It had no floor. No end. No bottom to push off from.
I stared at the dark wall as haunting images of my sister flashed through my mind. The way she’d held Ares the first time I put him in her arms, looking at me from over his head with that expression—the one where she pretended to be annoyed but wasn’t. Where I knew she was saying, without saying it, that she was in. That wherever this was going, she was coming with me.
Because despite all the arguments and yelling matches and pissing contests, she had always been there with me. Always backed me up. Always willing to die on whatever hill I was planning to climb next.
She was supposed to be alive and glowing and packing up our bags together so we could leave this godforsaken town with the men we loved and never again look back.
Gabriel was supposed to be downstairs, ready to take on whatever life decided to throw at us. Calm in the way I had never managed to be. Certain in the way that cost him everything.
And Ares. He was supposed to have a life. A whole one. Long and hard and full of things none of us could have predicted. He’d been given nothing. Not even enough time to find out what he might have been.
The Order had taken all of it.
My father. My home. My Keeper. My sister and my brother. They’d burned it all down until there was nothing left but ash and ghosts and the pieces of me that hadn’t died yet only because they hadn’t gotten around to it.
But they would.
The moment they found out I was still alive, they’d come back and finish the job. They always came back. They always found a way. And they weren’t going to stop—not for negotiations, not for reason or mercy, not for anything—because that wasn’t how the Order worked. They’d already killed Tessa and Gabriel and an innocent baby who hadn’t even learned to recognize the sound of his own name yet, let alone done a single bad thing to anyone.
And they would kill Trace and Dominic too.
The second they got the chance, they would take them from me too. They were never going to stop coming until there was nothing left to come for. Until I was dead and buried and six feet under. And maybe that’s where I belonged. Maybe that’s where my story was always supposed to end.
But if I was going down, I wasn’t going quietly. If this was how it ended, then I was going to set the whole world on fire and take every last one of them with me.
Something began to stir underneath the grief. Something that wasn’t grief at all.
I wanted them dead. All of them. I wanted it more than I wanted to be alive, more than I wanted anything, and it was the clearest and most honest thing I had felt since my mother said those four words to me over the sound of breaking rain.
They should have been dead already. I should have made sure of it a long time ago. But I’d hesitated. I’d backed down. I’d tried to do it the right way, the civil way, the measured way, the way that let me sleep at night and still believe I was one of the good ones.
And now three more of the people I loved were dead because of it. But I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
