Page 156 of Incoronate
The growling cut off at once. The hellhound at the foot of the stairs ducked its enormous head once and went still. He looked like the pack leader, though I wasn’t entirely sure hellhounds even had packs.
Dominic blinked at me. “I’m not going to lie. That was unreasonably attractive.”
“Focus,” I scolded him, even though the corner of my mouth pulled up anyway.
Trace hadn’t said much since the army of darkness had started arriving. He stood by the window in the living room,watching them gather on the lawn under the dark sky, his arms crossed and his jaw set. I knew that kind of silence. It was the one that came over him when he was running every possible outcome and not liking most of them.
I crossed to him and slid my hand up his back. “Hey you.”
He didn’t turn. “You’re calmer than I expected you to be.”
“It’s the throne. There’s something…grounding about it. I can’t explain it.” I rested my chin against his shoulder. “I’m still me though. Just a little less afraid.”
He turned his head just enough to meet my eyes. The blue of them had gone dark and unreadable in the storm light. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
I frowned at him. “What do you mean?”
“Fear, in the right amount, is what keeps us careful,” he said, his voice low. “And careful is the thing that keeps us alive.”
I couldn’t really argue that, so I didn’t. “I’ll always be careful. I have too much to live for, remember?”
He smiled, his dimples pressing in faintly as he dropped a kiss on top of my head. He seemed to like that answer.
I leaned into him for a beat longer and let his warmth wrap itself around me before continuing on with my rounds to make sure everyone was behaving and no one was stealing the good silverware.
As I made my way past the foyer, I caught Arianna standing in the hallway outside the study, her amber eyes already fixed on the spot where I would appear before I’d even rounded the corner. She’d been doing that for as long as I’d known her. Seeing things half a heartbeat before they actually happened. But tonight there was something different about her stillness. As though she were waiting for me specifically.
I slowed my pace.
“He’s going to be magnificent, you know.”
The words came out of nowhere, soft and entirely unprompted, and it took me a beat to even register what she’d said. “Excuse me?”
“Your brother.” Her gaze didn’t move from mine. “The one you crossed time itself to bring back.”
Something cold and protective rose in my chest before she’d even finished the sentence. I knew exactly where this was going. The Son of Perdition. The piece of their old blueprint they never got to keep.
“Whatever you and your sisters are still hoping for where Ares is concerned, let it go,” I warned, my voice cutting clean through the space between us. “He’s my family now. He doesn’t belong to your prophecies or your spells or whatever long game you’ve been running since before he was born.”
Arianna tilted her head, slow and considering. “We’re not the ones who decided what he is, Jemma. We only knew before everyone else did.”
“He’s a child.”
“For now.”
The two words landed somewhere deep in my chest and nearly broke everything there.
“The world isn’t going to be ready for what he will become or the power he will be able to wield,” she went on, her distant eyes holding mine. “It’s going to be biblical.”
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“You’ll see,” she said and then turned on her heel and drifted off toward the kitchen as though the conversation had never happened, leaving me standing in the hall with a fresh, low-grade dread burrowing in somewhere behind my ribs.
I did my best to shake it off. I’d worry about that later. Once we survived tonight and all of this nightmare was far behind us.
Turning back for the living room, I spotted Anita sitting in front of the coffee table, laying out a small, jagged-edged stone the color of dried blood, drawing something on a piece of paper next to it, her brow furrowed in concentration. “You’ll want to be careful what you ask of them,” she said without looking up. “They will do it. Whatever it is. Even if it’s the wrong thing.”
Yikes. Talk about pressure.
