Page 164 of Incoronate
“If that’s what it takes.”
He nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed something he had already suspected. Then his eyes moved, just briefly, to a point on the wall behind me, and back. Almost too quick to catch.
But I caught it.
“Why don’t you ask your demons,” said William softly, “what they’re currently standing on top of.”
I stiffened at his question, my eyes instantly narrowing and locking on his.
I didn’t reach for the throne in front of him. I didn’t need to. The throne reached for me, the way it had been doing all night, faster every time. The line dropped down from the back of my neck and out into the ground beneath us in less than a breath, and I felt it the moment my awareness brushed against what was buried under Temple.
Sigils.
Not one. Not a few. Hundreds. Layered into the foundation stones, ringed around the perimeter, woven into the gravel paths where my demons were standing. A whole secondary ward I hadn’t felt walking in because they hadn’t been active. They hadn’t needed to be. But they were active now.
“You son of a bitch,” I breathed.
Satisfaction flickered across his face. “I would prefer if you sat down.”
“What did you do?”
He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. He had already won this part of the conversation and we both knew it. “The sigils beneath this building are all tied to the same anchor point,” he said evenly. “My heart. So long as it beats, they remain dormant. The moment it stops, the building itself becomes a weapon. Every demon currently standing on Temple grounds will be incinerated where they stand. So will every supernatural within a half-mile radius of the building. Your Revenant included.” His eyes flicked to Trace and then Dominic. “Both of them.”
The blood drained out of my face.
“It is also,” he went on, his voice barely above a murmur, “tied to a delivery system. A failsafe. The Council, in its wisdom, considered it prudent some years ago to develop a mechanism by which, in the event of a catastrophic incursion, certain… municipal water sources… could be made inhospitable. To protect the remaining population from infection. From conversion. From things they would not survive.”
It took me a beat to understand what he was telling me.
When I did, the room tilted.
“Hollow Hills,” I whispered.
“Forty thousand human souls,” he confirmed gently. “The water in every home, every school, every hospital. The mechanism activates the moment my heart stops. It is automatic. Irreversible. By morning, there will not be a living human inside the city limits.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“Including your mother. The friends you went to school with. Every last name in the records that matters to you.” His eyes stayed on mine. “It would be a small mercy that your sister and the boy are no longer in town to share the same fate.”
Trace’s hand was on my arm. I didn’t remember him crossing the room.
“Jemma.” His voice was low and tight in my ear. “Don’t.”
“You wouldn’t.” I forced the words out through teeth that didn’t want to part for them. “You wouldn’t kill forty thousand of your own people just to save your skin.”
“I am not saving my skin, my dear. I never was.” He shook his head once, slow and tired. “I am protecting a world that you, in your grief, would otherwise unmake. And if my death is the trigger that forces you to reconsider what you’ve become, then yes. I am willing to take forty thousand souls with me to make sure you do.”
He’s stunned me silent.
I stared at him and waited for the apologetic crease to appear at the corners of his eyes, the small confessional softening at his mouth, the something that said this was a man who would carry the weight of what he was threatening. There was nothing. Just that calm, terrible certainty. The certainty of a man who had decided, somewhere along the way, that the math came out the same regardless of the bodies.
“Walk away,” he said. “Call your army back. Take your Reaper and your Revenant and disappear, the way you should have the moment you came back through the seam. Live the rest of your life on the other side of the world, somewhere this Order will never be made to look at you again. And in return, this town goes on breathing. Your mother. The home you grew up in. Every face you would mourn if it were taken from you tomorrow.” His head tipped, just slightly. “You walk out of this office today, and I make sure not a single hair on any of their heads is ever touched again. You have my word.”
I couldn’t move.
The throne hummed against the back of my neck, waiting for instruction. I felt my Dark Legion through it, every last one of them, standing on top of a slaughterhouse in the rain. I felt Trace’s hand on my arm and Dominic at my back and the men I loved suddenly inside the kill zone with me. I felt, somewhere far beyond all of it, the long quiet beat of forty thousand hearts I had never met, every one of them about to stop because of a choice I was about to make in this room.
For one fractured second, I almost reached for the throne and called the army back. Almost gave up on the spot and let him win. Again.
