Page 135 of Incoronate
“Yeah. Let you.” He pushed forward, closing out what little space remained between us, his eyes dropping back to mine. “You’re my soulmate, Jemma. Watching you erase yourself is not something I’m ever going to let happen without a fight. If that makes me a piece of shit, then so be it.” Something fierce and immovable moved through his expression. “I didn’t come back from the dead twice to lose you like this.”
The words hit somewhere deep and tender, and for a moment I just stood there inside them.
It wasn’t like I wanted to die. The goal wasn’t to erase myself from my life or cease to exist altogether and leave them here without me. But how was I supposed to go on living as though Tessa and Gabriel and Ares were just collateral damage? As though losing them like this wasn’t going to eat away at me for the rest of my life?
“You can’t just expect me to let this go,” I said, my voice cracking at the edges despite my best efforts remain composed. Angry, grief-stricken tears burned beneath my lids. “To do nothing. To just sit here and wait for The Order to come back and finish the job.”
“I don’t expect you to do any of that,” he said, shaking his head as he blew out a breath. “But you have to be smart about this. Right now your grief is just sitting on your chest making you feel like you’re drowning. And you know what people do when they’re drowning? They panic. They make stupid mistakes. And that’s exactly the way the Order wants you.”
I pressed my lips together as his words hit me harder than I’d wanted them to. Because he wasn’t wrong. I’d done exactly that a hundred times before. Made decisions out of fear and grief and panic. Run straight into things with both hands out and my brain fully switched off, and I had the body count to show for it.
But this wasn’t that.
“I know what it looks like,” I said, lifting my chin. “I know you think I’m not thinking straight. But I am.” I held his gaze and refused to look away from it. “My Alt did it, Trace. She ported herself back and turned you into a Revenant right before my eyes. She changed the outcome of something that had already happened.”
Something moved across his face. A fault line. Barely visible, but there.
“If my Alt was able to do it then it means it can be done,” I pushed, needing him to see that this wasn’t just a half-baked idea I pulled out of nowhere. “There has to be a way.”
“We don’t know what was at play when she did it,” he said, slower than before, the certainty in it worn down just slightly at the edges. “There could have been safeguards. A tether, a spell, something we have no access to on this Timeline. We can’t just assume she walked in without protection and came out the other side clean.”
“Then we do the same thing,” I said. “We find out what she used and we build the same safeguards.”
His jaw tightened. “How? We don’t know what she did, Jemma. Come on. Use your head.”
“I am using my head!” The words came out louder than I meant them to, bouncing off the walls and hanging in the air between us. I pulled in a breath through my nose and tried again, quieter. “I am. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
He looked at me for a heartbeat, something working behind his eyes that he wasn’t saying out loud. I knew what it was. I could feel it through the bond—not the argument, not the logic, but the fear. The raw, animal fear of losing me that was dressed up in reason because that was the only way he knew how to hold it.
He couldn’t see past it. That was the problem. He was looking at this through the lens of everything he stood to lose, and it was making the rest of the picture go dark around the edges. But I wasn’t looking at it that way. I couldn’t afford to.
I could feel in my chest that I was supposed to do this. Not in the way that panic felt or grief felt or the desperate, clawing need to fix something unfixable. This was different. Quieter. It sat underneath all of that noise like bedrock, solid andunmovable, the kind of knowing that didn’t need to announce itself. I felt it in my heart, like a second heartbeat that was louder and stronger and bigger than anything inside me.
“I know I’m supposed to do this, Trace. I can feel it,” I said, pressing my fingers against my sternum. “None of this happened by accident. It’s not some random idea I made up. I saw it in my dream,” I went on, the words coming out quickly and evenly. “I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. And maybe it sounds stupid and impossible to you, but I know I’m meant to do this, and if I’m meant to do it then that means there has to be a way.”
That shut him up for a second.
“What dream?” asked Dominic, climbing off the bed and slowly making his way to us as he smoothed his hand over his freshly pressed, black button-up shirt.
“The dream I had last year, right before Sanguinarium started bleeding into our realm.” I paused, wetting my lips as I searched for a drop of moisture. “I dreamt the red sky before it came, and I think I dreamt Ares before he was born. He stood under that red sky with me, with the same gray eyes as mine, and told me I had to go back and make it right, and I didn’t understand it then. I didn’t know who he was then or what he was talking about, but I do now.”
Trace went very still as Dominic’s expression sharpened, both of them no longer trying to manage me, but actually listening. I needed them to stay there. Needed them to believe in this as much as I did, because if they didn’t, I knew they would try to stop me at every turn.
“He was trying to warn me. To tell me how to fix this. Once the Timeline locked him in and his birth became fixed, I think he found a way to reach backward through it. To find me before any of this happened, so that when it did, I wouldn’t be starting from nothing. I would know what to do.” I lookedbetween them both, feeling the truth of it burning in my chest like an ember that refused to go out. “He came to me in the only way he could, in a form he knew I would recognize.”
Trace crossed his arms and said nothing for a moment, the muscle in his jaw working as he turned it over, looking for holes in the roadmap.
“I’m not asking you to believe in a dream,” I said, quieter, the fight in my voice settling into something sounder. “I’m asking you to believe in me.”
“And if you’re wrong?” asked Dominic, stepping closer until he was near enough that I had to tip my chin up to hold his gaze. His eyes moved over my face, taking in every feature as though he were committing it to memory. “What then, angel?”
I held his gaze. “Then at least I tried.” I lifted one shoulder in a small shrug, because that was all I had to offer them. “But I’m not wrong.”
Trace dragged both hands back through his hair, exhaling hard through his nose. “It’s still too risky. The chances of getting trapped in a loop or erased altogether are too high.”
“My Alt—”
“We don’t know anything about what she did or didn’t do,” he cut in, his blue eyes serious and unblinking. “We don’t even know if she made it back to her Timeline at all. For all we know, she’s stuck in some in-between loop right now. Trapped in a pocket of the Timeline that can never close because she disrupted it.”
