Page 103 of Incoronate
If that meant sacrificing myself to do it, then I was okay with that.
Ares deserved better than a world where the Order decided his fate before he could even speak his first words. He deserved a chance to grow up free. To be safe and loved without condition or fear.
And I knew I was meant to be the one to give that to him.
I waited for the fear to come, gave it room to creep up on me the way you hold a door open for someone you are certain is just behind you. But it never came.
I thought about it the way you think about something you’ve been told you’re supposed to feel, turning it over in my mind and searching for it deep down in the cracks and crevices where I kept all my secrets buried, and found—with no small bewilderment—that it wasn’t there. Not the cold, clawing kind that had kept me up for weeks after I first understood what I was. Not the breathless panic that used to seize me when I thought about what was coming.
There was something in its place that I couldn’t quite name yet. A stillness that felt less like peace and more like resolution. Like a decision already made, waiting only for me to catch up to it.
I grabbed an extra towel and squeezed the excess water from my hair, the automatic motion grounding me. I thought back to that day all those months ago when Trace told me he thought I was going to be a force to be reckoned with one day. I’d laughed at him. The idea had been preposterous at the time, given I was afraid of my own shadow. But he’d looked at me with that immovable certainty he had about everything and told me everyone was afraid of something. That fear didn’t make us weak. It only meant we were alive. And that real courage was feeling that fear down to your bones and doing it anyway.
I hadn’t believed him then. I wasn’t sure I’d fully believed him until right now, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, in a house full of people I loved, on the last night before everything changed.
Maybe this was what it felt like. Not the absence of fear, but the moment it finally stopped being the loudest thing in the room.
Somewhere between all the training and the bleeding and the slow, grinding accumulation of everything this year had asked of me, the fear had stopped being about what I might lose and had started being about what I might fail to prevent. Those weren’t the same thing. One was a wound that caved inward. The other was a reason to stand up. And I was choosing to stand up.
I pulled on one of Trace’s oversized t-shirts that had migrated into my things over the last couple of weeks, then tugged on a pair of sleep shorts before turning to the door. I pressed my hand against the frame, gathered myself, and stepped out into the bedroom.
The room had gone dim while I was in the shower, lit only by the low amber lamp on the nightstand and the pale spillage of streetlights through the curtains. Dominic was by the window, one shoulder braced against the wall beside it, arms loosely crossed. The moonlight caught the angled lines of his face the way it always did, throwing shadows that made him look like he’d been carved from something expensive and unmalleable and then left to stand in rooms as proof that beautiful things could also be devastating. He wasn’t looking at me. His attention was caught on something outside the window, far away and untouchable in the way he sometimes let himself be when he thought no one was paying close enough attention.
Except I knew better. I’d seen beneath that carefully constructed mask.
My gaze moved to Trace on the edge of the bed, elbows resting on his knees, hands clasped between them. His blue eyes lifted to mine the moment I stepped into the room, the amber glow catching the lines of his cheekbones and making his midnight black hair look gentler in this light. I felt the bond between us hum low and wordless in my chest, the way it always did when he was close. Like a string pulled taut and then released.
Dominic turned from the window.
None of us said anything.
Instead, a million things moved through the bonds in that instant. Words none of us were equipped to say out loud. Or maybe just words that had long since outgrown language entirely and now lived in the space between us instead, in the invisible architecture of everything we’d been through and chosen and survived together. I felt it all moving through me in a slow, terrible wave.
Love poured from it first, enormous and aching, the kind that doesn’t announce itself with any single moment but simply accumulates over time like sediment, layer upon patient layer, until one day you realize you are built from it. That you can’t separate it from yourself if you tried.
Their fear came underneath that. Hushed, but no less present, and I felt it the way you feel a storm before it arrives. The way the air changes and the light goes strange and something deep and animal in you understands, without being told, that something is coming that cannot be outrun. It wasn’t fear for themselves. I knew that without having to ask. It was the specific, devastating fear of someone who has found the one thing they cannot afford to lose and must now stand very still and watch it walk toward the fire anyway.
And then, underneath even that, something else. Something so deep it almost hurt to touch…a feeling I could only call awe, though the word was embarrassingly small for what it held.
They were looking at me the way astronomers look at a star going supernova. Like they were witnessing something that only happened once in the span of eternity, something that would burn itself into them permanently, something they would carry like light in the chest for the rest of their lives, even knowing that what made it beautiful was the same thing that made it an ending.
Trace, with his heart-stopping dimples and his soulful blue eyes that had never quite learned how to hide what he felt. He was looking at me with the ache of someone who had loved me so ferociously and so imperfectly that it had cost him something to get here. He had wanted to protect me from everything, including myself, including the very destiny that had made me his in the first place. He had held on too tight and had to learn to open his hands, and he had done it, slowly and painfully, because he loved me more than he loved being the one to save me.
That was what I saw in his face now. Not just love, but the hard-won kind. The kind that had been tested and bent and had chosen to stay anyway.
And Dominic, with his dark knowing eyes, watching me the way he always had. Like I was something that had always made perfect sense to him, even when I made no sense at all. He had never tried to sand down my edges or redirect my path or talk me into a safer version of myself. He had simply looked at me, from the very beginning, and decided that whatever I was, it was exactly enough. There was no expectation in his gaze. No grief over who I might have been. Only that devastating conviction he carried like a second skin. The kindthat, when it was turned on you, made you feel like you were being seen by someone who saw all the darkness and knew the worst of what you were and loved you for it, not in spite of it.
I felt their pride, too, which maybe undid me more than the rest of it.
Because I was still, in so many ways, the girl who had sat on a bathroom floor not so long ago and convinced herself that no one was coming. The girl who had flinched and doubted and broken and asked to be put back together more times than she should have needed to. And somehow, these two men were looking at me like I was the kind of person that things were named after. Like I was the kind of person you wrote down in the history books.
I didn’t know what to do with that. I wasn’t sure I ever would. But I let myself feel it anyway, because I knew that tomorrow we might not get another chance.
“I think I preferred it when you two were brooding separately.”
My voice came out gentler than I intended, but the almost-smile that followed it was real, despite everything that was looming over the room like a second ceiling.
Trace’s mouth twitched despite himself as Dominic exhaled something that could almost have been a laugh. It wasn’t a total fix, but it was enough to pull the air in the room loose, enough for me to take a full breath without having to fight for it.
