Page 161 of Incoronate
I stayed where I was, leaned forward between the two of them, content for the moment to just be in the small dark warmth of the SUV with the storm pressing against the glass and my men ahead of me on either side. My whole life, I’d been the loneliest person in every room I walked into. I didn’t feel that way anymore. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, but tonight, with what was waiting for us at the end of this drive, the absence of it sat sharper than usual.
Whatever was about to happen at Temple, I wasn’t walking into it alone.
I never would again. I knew that with the whole of my heart.
I let myself sit with that for another long moment before I finally pushed back from the console and sank back into my seat again.
We turned onto the long drive that led up to Temple, and I felt the breath go out of me.
The building rose out of the storm in front of us, dark and stone and exactly as I remembered it, every window a yellow rectangle against the gray. But it was what surrounded it that caught my breath.
They were everywhere.
The demons stood in loose, silent rows along every approach. Three deep at the main entrance. Lining the gravel paths. Pacing the perimeter in slow, unhurried sweeps. The hellhounds prowled the gardens, moving in and out of the shadows between the hedges like the storm had birthed them. Dark Casters stood in clusters of four and five along the property line, their hoods drawn against the rain, every one of them turning to face the SUV as we passed.
It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
And every last one of them was mine.
“Christ,” muttered Trace, his eyes moving across the windshield slowly, taking in the full scope of it. “You weren’t kidding.”
“Did you think I was?”
“No. I just didn’t expect it to look like…” His jaw worked once. “…that.”
“Like the end of the world?”
“Or the beginning of a completely new one,” he said as he pulled the SUV to a stop at the front of the building and killedthe engine. The rain hammered down on the roof as the three of us stared forward through the glass for a long beat, none of us moving.
“Last chance, angel,” said Dominic, twisting in the passenger seat so he could look back at me directly. “We can still turn this car around.”
“And do what exactly?”
“Run. Go into hiding. We could easily buy ourselves a few months and watch the Order tear itself apart trying to figure out how to contain you.”
I shook my head. “They’d come for us eventually.”
“They certainly would try.”
“Yup.” I blew out a tired breath. “And while they were trying, every other person I love would be in their crosshairs. We’d never be safe. Not until this is over.”
He was quiet for a beat. Then, “Very well, angel. Just checking.”
I smiled despite myself and shifted my attention to the back of Trace’s head. “What about you?” I asked.
He glanced at me in the rearview, blue eyes meeting mine in the small rectangle of glass. “Are you ready for this?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, just barely.
“And you?” I asked.
“Same.”
I held his gaze in the mirror a beat longer, searching for the brittle edge that usually showed up when he was about to walk into something he didn’t want me anywhere near, but it wasn’t there. What was there instead was something steadier. The look of a man who had decided, somewhere between Sanguinarium and now, that there was no version of this where he wasn’t standing exactly where I was standing.
That made two of us.
