Page 152 of Incoronate
“You don’tknow.” His voice cracked at the edge of it. “You can’t know. There’s no coming back from something like that, Jemma. You can’t take a crown like that off.”
“I’m not planning to.”
The rain hit the windows harder. He stared at me as though he was hoping I’d take it back. As though if he held thesilence long enough, I’d hear the weight of what I was saying and reconsider.
I didn’t.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be smaller than what I am,” I said, and the words came out soft because they were true. “Trying to be palatable. Trying to be the version of me the Order could live with. And every time I held something back, every time I bit my own teeth down on what I really am, they got to take a little more from me.” I pressed my fingers against my sternum. “I’m done shrinking, Trace. I’m done apologizing for what’s in my blood. They wanted Lucifer’s daughter? They’re about to get her.”
Dominic hadn’t moved. His dark eyes held mine, unreadable, the rain pattering through the silence between us.
“It’s a one-way door,” he said finally. The lowness of it was somehow worse than if he’d shouted it.
“I know.”
“You’ll be theirs. Forever. The Realms, the legions, all of it. There is no abdicating an inheritance like that. No quiet retirement to a beach somewhere with a margarita.”
“I know.”
“And you’ve made peace with that.”
“I made peace with it the moment my mother told me Ares and Tessa and Gabriel were dead.”
He studied me for a long beat, and I held it, refusing to look away from those dark, taking-apart eyes that always saw too much.
“Well, then,” he said, the corner of his mouth pulling up just slightly. “If we’re going to start an apocalypse, we might as well do it on time.”
I felt my breath catch. “You’re with me?”
“Angel.” A slow, devastating smirk curved his lips. “Did you really think I was going to let you have all the fun?”
I let out a shaky laugh, half exhale, half disbelief. Then I turned to Trace.
He hadn’t moved from the window. He was still staring out at the rain, his jaw tight, his hands flexing at his sides like he didn’t know where to put them. Like every part of him was at war with every other part.
“Trace.”
He didn’t turn.
“I won’t do it without you,” I said, and I meant it.
He pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. Then, finally, he turned. There were a hundred things in his eyes then. Grief and fear and that particular kind of love that didn’t know how to say no even when every survival instinct he had was screaming at him to.
He crossed the room without a word. When he reached me, he caught my face between his hands, and just held me there, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw like he was committing me to memory.
“If we do this,” he said, his voice low and rough, “we do it together. All the way from here on out. No half-in bullshit. No coming back to me later and telling me to walk away for my own good or yours or whoever’s.”
“Okay,” I said breathlessly.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He pressed a kiss to my mouth, then dropped his forehead to mine, releasing his breath in one long, surrendering exhale. “Then claim your fucking throne, baby.”
The words moved through me like a benediction and a battle cry stitched together. There was no fear in them. No grief or hesitation or quiet plea for me to reconsider hidden underneath. Just absolute, unshakeable faith. Faith that I could do this. That he would still know me on the other sideof it, and that whatever I would become, it would be someone that he was already prepared to love.
Everything inside me went very still. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of what I was stepping into. Because whoever I was about to be, wherever this life would take me, I knew I wasn’t going to be alone in it.
