Page 53 of Incoronate
“I know this world is dangerous, Tess. That it’s violent and unpredictable and there are no guarantees. But you can teach them how to survive it. How to fight. How to protect themselves. How to be strong in a world that’s always trying to break them,” I said, knowing she knew exactly what I was talking about. “And you can give them what we never had. A mother who stays. A family that tells the truth.”
Another tear trickled down her face as she processed my words. My version of the future. I watched her turn it over in her mind the way she always did. Looking for the flaws. The weak points. The places where everything could go wrong and fall apart on her.
“And you won’t be doing it alone,” I added, the words coming out more like a vow than a reassurance. “If you choose to keep this baby, we’d protect them together. All of us. We’d make sure they grow up knowing they’re loved and safe and that there are people in this world who would burn the entire planet down before they let anything hurt them.”
“You can’t promise that, Jemma. You literally almost just died againyesterday. I’d be shocked if either one of us made it to it’s eighteenth birthday.”
“Okay,fine,” I said, giving her that one. “But I can promise to try. And if anything ever happens to me and I’m not around to keep my word, I promise you Trace and Dominic will keep it for me. They’d reach across time itself if they had to.”
“True,” she said and then smiled around it. “It’s not like they haven’t done it before.”
“Exactly.” My brows pulled together as her words fully registered. “Wait, what do you mean?”
“When Trace’s Alt came back and stopped me from killing Dominic.”
The memory rose up before I could brace for it. The chaos in that room. The blood. Pricilla’s head on the floor. Tessa’sdagger at Dominic’s throat, and the scream that had ripped out of me when I realized what she was about to do. The split second when I thought I’d lost him for good. And then Trace. Two of him. One beside me, one behind my sister, whispering something into her ear that had stopped her cold.
Whatever he’d said to her had ended it. Had bought Dominic his life.
And I’d never asked her what it was.
Maybe because I’d been too afraid of the answer. Or maybe because some part of me had needed to leave that moment in the past, sealed away with all the other near-disasters I couldn’t bear to look at directly. But it was different now. We were different now. And there were no more secrets left to hide behind, not after everything we’d survived in the last few months.
I met her eyes, finally letting myself ask the question I should have asked a long time ago. “What did he say to you?”
Tessa huffed out a breath and looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb over her knuckles as though it still hurt to think about what she’d almost done. “He said that if I did it, I might as well put the knife in your heart too, because you would never come back from losing him. That he lived the agony every day with you.”
The air caught in my lungs as the words landed somewhere deep and irreversible inside me. I sat with them for a long moment, unable to speak or even move. Trace had come back through time to save Dominic. To save me from losing him. To save me from whatever I would have become without him.
I swallowed hard, my eyes welling up before I could blink them back.
“He’s loved you in ways you don’t even know yet, Jem,” she said, almost awestruck. “Both of them have.”
My throat thickened so painfully I could barely speak, the truth of it pressing down on my chest like a hand. After everything I’d put them through. Every choice I’d made. Every line I’d crossed to keep them both alive. They had loved me back through every single one of them. Across timelines. Across dimensions. Across the rules that were supposed to bind them and keep us apart.
I leaned my head back against her shoulder and let the tears fall this time, letting them blur the room and everything in it.
For a long while, neither of us said anything. We just sat there together in the late-afternoon hush, two sisters who had survived more than either of us had any right to survive, holding each other up the only way we knew how.
Outside the window, the light was beginning to turn. Long amber shafts cut through the trees and laid themselves across her bedroom floor, gentling the room in a way the day hadn’t earned. Somewhere downstairs, a door opened and closed. Footsteps moved through the kitchen. Life going on, even though our world had cracked open all over again in this room.
The future wasn’t finished with us yet. There was a baby coming. There were Horsemen still circling. There was an anointment buried in my body that no spell could fully undo, and there were people I loved who had already paid more than I could bear to think about just to keep me here, breathing, on this side of whatever was coming next.
But Tessa wasn’t going to face her storm alone. And neither was I. And maybe, in the end, that was the only kind of promise that ever really mattered.
17. THE HAND THAT FEEDS
The smell of Isa’s cooking drew us out of Tessa’s room some time later. My stomach growled in response, reminding me that the last thing I’d eaten had been a few spoonfuls of broth Isa had managed to coax into me, and that had been days ago at this point. Tessa walked beside me, her steps slower than usual, her hand resting absently on her stomach in a way I was sure she didn’t even realize she was doing anymore.
We rounded the corner into the kitchen and I stopped short, my hand catching the door frame.
Jaqueline was sitting at the breakfast table.
Just sitting there, like she hadn’t spent the last week chained to a wall in our basement, lost to a bloodlust we hadn’t been sure she’d come back from. Like the world hadn’t tilted sideways for all of us in the time since I’d had a coherent conversation with her.
Despite all of that, she looked mostly like herself again. Her dark hair pulled back into a neat bun at the base of her skull and her posture composed in that way only she could manage, but there was something fragile in the lines of her face. Something hollowed out behind her eyes that hadn’t been there before. The aftermath of being driven by something other than yourself. Of doing things you’d never agreed to. I knew that look intimately. I had been wearing it myself for weeks.
My gaze flicked to Trace and Dominic, both of them already watching me from their seats at the table, gauging my reaction, ready to step in if it looked like I needed them to. Gabriel, who’d been the one keeping watch over Jaqueline through the worst of it, sat at the head of the table with thekind of guarded posture that said he wasn’t quite ready to relax just yet. As though some part of him were still waiting for the bottom to fall out a second time.
