Page 133 of Incoronate
If my life in Hollow Hills had taught me anything, it was that the good guys always finished last. They paid the highest price. They got their family’s slaughter while being forced to watch their loved ones got picked off one by one. And if that was what being the hero meant—if that was the cost of playing by the rules in a game that had never had any—then I wanted no part of it.
Not anymore.
I’d been so afraid of what I would become if I let myself be what I was, so afraid of the dark in me and what it would do if I stopped fighting it, that I had given the Order the only thing they’d ever actually needed from me. Time. If only I would have had the guts to be the Daughter of Hades they’d always feared instead of the girl who kept apologizing for it, maybe they’d still be alive. Maybe. But I’d never know now. Because as much as I wanted to go back and do it all over, to go back and make it right, I knew I—
The thought stopped as my mind caught on something sharp. Something I couldn’t immediately place.
Make it right…
The words replayed in my head as an old and distant memory resurfaced. No. Not a memory.
A dream.
A raven called out above us, its voice echoing through the red sky before diving down to the ground beside me.
“Did you see that?” I asked Trace, but he was still staring forward, talking to himself in voiceless riddles.
I turned back to the raven and found Dominic kneeling in its place, the strange sky illuminating him in all the right ways. He stood up and reached out to me, stroking my cheek with the back of his fingers, letting me know everything was going to be okay. But I knew it was a lie.
“What’s going on?” I asked them, but neither one responded. “Why won’t anyone answer me?”
“This isn’t their time,” said a small voice from behind.
I turned toward the sound; a little boy no more than eight or nine years old. His dark hair was parted to the side, and his eyes were a familiar shade of gray.
“What does that mean?” I asked him, bending down to meet him where he stood. “Whose time is it?”
“Yours.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You have to go back. You have to make it right.”
“Go back where? Make what right?”
“The answers you seek are right where you are,” he said, pointing over my shoulder into the horizon.
I followed his gaze down the abandoned street. “There’s nothing out there,” I said, looking back at him. But he was already gone.
You have to go back…
You have to make it right…
The words moved through me like electricity, over and over, until they weren’t just words anymore. Until they were something I could feel in my bones, something that had been waiting since the very beginning to be understood.
And then it hit me. Not slowly. Not like a thought quietly arriving, but like a door being kicked open.
The boy’s eyes. That familiar shade of gray I had seen somewhere before, somewhere recent, somewhere that had nothing to do with a dream from years ago.
Ares.
I snapped upright.
The covers fell away as the room crashed back into focus all at once—the dark walls, the low light bleeding in from the hallway, the two of them already moving, already watching me, because they had never once looked away. Dominic was on the edge of the bed beside me before I’d finished sitting up. Trace was on his knees at the side of it, both hands braced on the mattress, his blue eyes searching my face with the careful intensity of someone who had been waiting a long time for me to come back. Who would spend his life waiting if that was what it took.
Everything clicked into place at once, clean and irreversible, like tumblers turning in a lock. There was no deliberating. No weighing it up. Every part of me had already decided before I’d even opened my mouth, and the certainty of it was so complete it felt less like a choice and more like something I was simply catching up to.
“What is it, angel?” said Dominic.
