Page 70 of Incoronate
I recognized the features, but the expression was all wrong.
A knock at the door pulled my attention away from the mirror.
“Everything alright in there, angel?” Dominic’s voice drifted through the wood. Casual, but edged with concern.
“Yeah.” I was surprised by how normal I sounded. How even. “I need a glass of water.”
A beat of silence. Then Trace’s voice from somewhere further away. “On it.”
I waited. Counted his footsteps as they retreated down the hallway. One. Two. Three. Four.
Then I wrapped my fingers around one of the stakes, pulled it free from my waistband, and opened the door.
Dominic stood directly in front of me. Close enough that I could see the exact moment confusion flickered across his face. Close enough that his eyes started to form a question.
But I didn’t give him a chance to ask it.
22. BORN UNTO SLAUGHTER
The stake sank into Dominic’s chest with more force than I even knew I had, driving through fabric and skin and muscle and bone until it found his heart and pierced straight through it.
His eyes went wide. Not with pain, but with pure, unfiltered shock. Betrayal washed over his features in the span of a heartbeat, followed by a dawning understanding that came too late to change anything. The color began to drain from his face, his lips parting around a word he never managed to form before life bled out of him in real time.
His knees buckled a beat later.
He dropped like a stone, hitting the floor hard enough that the impact shuddered through the floorboards. I stepped over his body without pausing, without looking back at the way his eyes had gone glassy and fixed. At the stake still protruding from his chest. None of it registered. Because none of it mattered.
Trace was already in the hallway when I emerged. The glass of water hung forgotten in his hand as he took in the scene. Dominic motionless on the bathroom floor behind me. Me standing in the doorway with the second stake still tucked into my waistband and blood on my hands that could have been mine or his, or maybe both.
His face went blank, before crumpling completely.
“Jemma?” His gaze dropped to Dominic’s incapacitated body before flicking back up to me. “What did you do?”
“He attacked me.” The words came out mechanical. Stripped of any tremor or inflection that might have made them sound real.
Trace’s brows pulled together, confusion washing over his features. “What? What do you mean he attacked you?”
“Out of nowhere.” I kept my voice even and as empty as the hollow space where my emotions used to live. “I opened the door and he just…lunged.”
He took a step toward me, and then another. I stood completely still, waiting with the patience of someone who had all the time in the world. Letting him close the distance for what came next.
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Trace shook his head, his mind clearly working to piece together something that would never add up no matter how hard he tried. His eyes dropped to Dominic’s body again, then back to me. “Why would he—”
“I think the anchoring spell might have done something to him,” I lied.
“The anchoring spell,” he repeated, the words coming out strangled and distraught, as if he were grasping at any explanation that didn’t involve me being the monster standing in front of him.
“I was so scared.”
He cursed under his breath and closed the distance between us, and that single gesture of compassion was all I needed. The second he was within reach, I yanked the second stake free from my waistband and drove it forward in one fluid motion. The wood sank into his chest before he even realized what was happening.
His eyes flew open in shock as the glass slipped from his hand, shattering against the hardwood as water spread across the floor in a growing puddle. The sound of breaking glass still echoed in the stillness of the hallway as the color and life drained from his face just like it had from Dominic’s.
His body slumped onto the ground across from Dominic, hitting the floor with a muffled thud that seemed to carrythrough the entire house. I stood there for a moment, looking down at them both. Two bodies sprawled motionless on the floor. Two stakes buried in their chests. Two men who had done everything in their power to save me, now incapacitated by my own hand.
And I felt nothing.
Just the persistent pull of the baby’s heartbeat hammering somewhere out there in the dark, close enough now that I could almost taste his power on my tongue.
