Page 127 of Incoronate
“The Blackburn Estate,” answered Dominic, his voice low and somber. “Or whatever’s left of it.”
Trace stepped forward into my sightline, picking his way carefully across the ruined floor, hands shoved through his hair as he turned and looked at what surrounded us from every angle. “How did this happen?”
“I’ll give you one guess,” I said, feeling the grief in my chest curdle into something harder. Something dangerous.
Trace met my eyes, confusion drawing his brows together. “Why would The Order burn your house down when they already had us?”
“I don’t know.” I couldn’t explain why but I knew it was them. I knew they had come back here while we were gone,while we were trapped in Sanguinarium with no way home and no way to stop them, and they had burned my entire life to the ground. “Maybe they did it to destroy the evidence or to send some kind of message. Or maybe they just wanted to wipe out the last fucking trace of me from this earth,” I answered, bitterness and fury bleeding into my voice in equal measure. “Maybe they just did it for the fuck of it.”
Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it was the latter.
One final nail to my coffin, just because they could.
“This doesn’t look fresh,” noted Trace, tilting his head back to look at the open sky through the hole where the ceiling used to be, then glancing down at the gap in the floorboards that dropped straight through to what was left of the floor below. “How long do you think we were gone.”
My stomach turned over at Trace’s question. I hadn’t let myself think about that yet, hadn’t even had a chance to even if I’d wanted to, but now that he’d said it out loud, I couldn’t put it back. I knew time moved differently in Sanguinarium, but what exactly that meant for us now that we were back on this side, I still had no idea.
“By the looks of it, it’s been a while,” said Dominic, his jaw tightening as he looked around the room with the measured calm of someone doing rapid, unpleasant arithmetic in their head. His gaze dropped to the corner of the room and stayed there. “Quite a while,” he amended indistinctly.
I followed his gaze to the dense pile of dead leaves that had drifted in through the open walls and settled against the scorched baseboard. Layers upon layers of them, none of them the right color anymore. Whatever season we’d left behind had come and gone without us.
The knot in my stomach pulled tighter.
“We’ve seen enough.” Dominic’s voice cut through the noise in my head. “It isn’t safe here. We need to go,” he said,his eyes cutting briefly to the open structure around us before coming back to me. I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the state of the floors or the fact that we were standing exposed in the Order’s handiwork where they could easily descend on us again, but something told me it was probably both.
Despite knowing he was right, I still hadn’t moved. I couldn’t seem to do anything other than stand there in the ashes and be useless.
“Angel.” A beat. “Are you hearing me?”
When I still didn’t answer, he crossed the ruined floor to where I was standing. He said nothing as he curved two fingers under my chin and tipped my face up to his.
Whatever he read on my face made his composure slip for a second.
“It’s all gone,” I breathed, my eyes filling before I could stop them.
He pulled me into his chest and wrapped his arms around me, holding me firm against him without a word, as though he had no intention of ever letting me go again. The angry, grief-stricken tears I’d been holding back broke free all at once. I gripped his shirt in both fists and pressed my face into him, my body shaking with silent sobs that hurt somewhere deeper than bone, deeper than anything I had a name for.
“Every picture I had of my dad,” I managed, barely above a broken whisper. “They’re all gone.”
Behind me I heard Trace exhale a sharp, quiet curse. He didn’t come closer. He held his position and let Dominic hold me, as though somewhere in the silent language the three of us had developed over everything we’d been through together, they’d already agreed on who was needed where.
Dominic’s hand moved to the back of my head. “Every last one of them is going to answer for this,” he said, low andunhurried, the promise in it so absolute it didn’t need volume to land. “I’ll see to it personally, angel.”
I knew he meant it. He’d burn down everything they’d ever built if it came to that, and he wouldn’t lose a moment’s sleep over it. As much as that meant to me, in that moment it didn’t do anything to bring those pictures back. Nothing would.
“We need to leave,” he said, turning toward Trace. “Can you manage to port us to the Manor?”
“I think so,” answered Trace as he moved to where I was still standing in Dominic’s arms. His cool hand came down against my back, and I instantly felt his emotions pouring into me through the bond. Everything from anger to sadness to something that almost felt like helplessness, as though he knew he couldn’t fix this for me. Couldn’t make it go away the way I desperately wanted it to.
The warmth of it lasted only a moment before the whipping cold came down and swept us away.
And with that, we were gone.
* * *
The Huntington Manor living room materialized around us slowly, the way it always did when Trace ported us through time and space. The familiar walls bleeding in first, followed by the floor solidifying beneath my feet until the world decided it was done rearranging itself.
At least this one was still standing.
