Page 134 of Incoronate
“I know what I have to do.” I looked between them, my voice far steadier than it had any right to be as something cold and certain pressed down into my chest, filling the space where my grief had been. “I have to go back.”
They exchanged a quick, worried look, as though I had sprung up out of the bed and started talking gibberish.
“Go back where?” asked Trace carefully, the shadows in the room catching the blue of his eyes and turning them dark, unreadable, the color of deep water before a storm.
“To the past,” I said, the words scraping on the way out. “I have to go back to where this started. To the night the Order came for us. I have to go back and fix it.”
44. A FOOL’S ERRAND
The rain rapped gently against the windows as Trace and Dominic stared back at me as though I had just suggested something so spectacularly unhinged that neither of them knew where to begin with it.
Dominic recovered first, his expression morphing into something I recognized immediately and liked considerably less up close. It was a careful, almost manufactured softening around the eyes. The kind that rarely showed up on his face, and usually only when he thought the situation called for gentleness rather than honesty.
Frankly, it looked a whole lot like pity.
“Angel.” My name sounded low and soft on his lips, almost placating. “That isn’t how it works. You know that’s not possible.”
“But it is possible.” The cast-iron certainty came out before I’d even finished the thought. “I’ve been to the past before, Dominic. Trace took me to see my father. I know it can be done.”
Dominic’s expression didn’t change. If anything, the pity only deepened. He turned to Trace as though handing off the conversation to someone who was more qualified to have it.
Trace’s cool hand came over mine, squeezing it gently. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to read my thoughts and decipher what the hell was going on in my head or if he was trying to use the bond to help calm me down.
“Both,” he answered, his brows pinching together with concern.
“I have to do this, Trace. It’s the only way to bring them back.”
“I know it feels like you need to do this, but you can’t change things in the past, Jemma,” he answered evenly as though that were the end of it. “You already know that.”
“No. That’s bullshit!” Pulling my hand back, I threw the covers off me and hurled myself off the bed. They both watched as I moved, their eyes almost synchronized as they tracked me across the room. “We don’t change anything. That’s not the same thing. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, holding onto the certainty that had been burning in my chest since the moment the dream slammed back into me. It wasn’t just a dream. It was more. It was a key cut for a lock I hadn’t even known I was going to need to open until now.
“Jemma—”
“I have to fix this. I’m going to fix this,” I cut in, refusing to back down. To listen to reason or excuses. “I just need to go back to the last chance I had to stop this. Before the Order came. Before they trapped us in Sanguinarium.”
Trace unfolded himself from where he was kneeling beside the bed and rose to his full height. My eyes moved over him before I could stop them. He’d changed at some point while I was lost inside my own head—loose jeans and a white t-shirt that sat against his shoulders in a way that would have been very distracting under any other circumstances.
His shadow fell over me as he closed the gap between us and dropped his eyes to mine. “I know you’re hurting right now, but this isn’t the way,” he said, his words hitting me harder than he’d probably meant them to. “You can’t just rewrite the past and walk back out the other side. It doesn’t work that way. Changing things in the past will only create a Ripple. Especially the wrong things. You could erase the version of yourself who made the choice to go back in thefirst place. Which erases the port. Which means it never happened.”
An uncomfortable shiver brushed over my skin.
“You’d disappear from your own Timeline,” he said, his jaw ticking once. “You know that.”
I did know. He’d explained it to me the day he’d ported me back to Florida to see my dad. The day that had cracked me open in all the right ways and put something back into that I’d thought I’d lost forever. A day I would never forget or stop being grateful for, no matter how many more days or months or years I had left.
But it still didn’t change anything.
“I don’t care if I erase myself,” I admitted. “If it stops them from being killed, then I’m willing to take that risk.”
“And what? We’re supposed to just stand here and let you wipe yourself out of existence?” His voice turned rougher, the careful gentleness stripped right out of it. “That isn’t a plan, Jemma. It’s suicide.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. For all we know, the Order lied about that too. They lie about everything,” I reminded him, knowing full well that wasn’t going to change a damn thing, let alone his mind.
“I’m still not going to let you be the fucking lab rat on this.”
My head jerked back at his words. “Let me?”
