Page 78 of Incoronate
Trace took a step toward me, his blue eyes searching mine with a focus that always made me feel like he was looking past my skin and into the rooms inside me. “You’re serious about this.”
“Dead serious.”
Gabriel’s posture eased a fraction, though the line of tension across his shoulders didn’t fully release. “And if the prophecy is real? If he becomes what they fear he will?”
“Then I’ll deal with it when that time comes,” I said, refusing to let them deter me. “But until then, he’s just a baby and I’m all he’s got. I’m going to take care of him andmake sure he gets the chance to be more than what everyone expects.”
Another beat of silence followed, longer this time.
To my surprise, it was Dominic who spoke first, breaking the silence he’d held since I’d walked through the door.
“What’s his name?” he asked, his dark gaze moving from the baby to me and then back again.
I looked down at him sleeping peacefully in my arms, taking in his tiny face and the perfect formation of features that had no business being so refined on someone only hours old.
“I haven’t decided yet,” I answered gingerly. “But I’m thinking…Ares.”
“Ares,” repeated Gabriel, testing the name on his tongue. “The god of war and courage.”
“He’s going to need both in spades if he’s going to survive what’s coming for him,” I said. “Might as well give him a name that will remind him he was built for it.”
Tessa let out a long breath. “You’re really doing this.”
“I really am.”
My sister stared at me for a long beat, her gray eyes moving across my face the way they did when she was trying to decide whether to argue with me or surrender to the inevitability of what I’d already decided I was going to do. Eventually, she shook her head with a flicker of admiration she didn’t quite manage to hide. “Alright then. I guess we’re raising the Son of Perdition. What could possibly go wrong?”
Despite everything, I felt my lips twitch into the barest hint of a smile.
Everything, probably.
But I’d find a way to face it when it came.
* * *
Dominic stood silhouetted against my bedroom window, his arms crossed over his chest as I fed the baby his first bottle. His attention pressed against my skin like a touch even from across the room, the silence he was wrapped in dense and more loaded than anything he could have said out loud.
Trace and Gabriel had left a little while ago to retrieve the bassinet from the Macarthurs’ house. Apparently, Trace’s parents had kept everything from when he and Linley were babies. Just in case. The thought alone made my chest ache in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Ares latched onto the bottle with surprising strength for someone so small. His tiny hands closed around my fingers as he drank, his gray eyes half-open and unfocused, his entire body so completely at ease that it almost felt like a kind of magic in itself. He had been born into the worst night of his life, and here he was, blinking up at me like I was the safest place he’d ever known.
The minutes stretched on without Dominic saying a word.
It was making me nervous.
“You don’t approve of this,” I finally said, keeping my eyes on Ares.
“I didn’t say that.”
“No,” I agreed quietly. “You didn’t say much of anything.”
The silence between us picked up where it had left off, broken only by the soft, contented sounds Ares made as he continued to drink.
“What would you like me to say, angel?” he asked as he uncrossed his arms and slid his hands into his pockets.
“I don’t know.” I looked down at the baby in my arms, at his eyes starting to drift closed with the kind of trust that should have terrified me but somehow only made me hold him tighter. “Maybe that you think I’m insane for bringinghim here. That I’m putting everyone at risk. That this is going to blow up in all of our faces.”
“Would it matter if I did?”
