Page 140 of Incoronate
“At least a day.”
My shoulders dropped. Twenty-four hours felt like an eternity sitting around waiting while Tessa and Gabriel and Ares stayed dead on the other side of a Timeline I couldn’t reach yet. I didn’t like it. Every part of me that had been running on adrenaline and certainty for the last several hours wanted to push back, to find some way to compress it, to move faster. But I knew I had no choice in the matter.
Anita glanced at Arianna, something passing between them that required no words. When she looked back at me, her expression darkened in a way that made the back of my neck prickle.
“There is one more thing you should know before you do this.”
Dammit. So close.
“The Temporal Binding is permanent. Once it locks you into that fixed point and you complete the transfer, the Timeline seal is irreversible. You will never again be able to travel through time.” Her gaze moved to Trace and stayed there. “That means all of you.”
Oh, my god.
My heart dropped all the way down into my stomach as I turned to Trace. He was a Reaper. Time travel wasn’t just something he could do, it was what he was, who he was, threaded into him at the DNA level. It was as natural as breathing to him, and here I was asking him to give it up forever.
Horrified, I started to shake my head, to tell him I couldn’t ask that of him—that I’d never ask that of him.
“Done,” he said without hesitation.
“Trace—”
“Done, Jemma.” The steadiness in his voice left no crack for argument. “It’s not even a question.”
I looked at him for a long moment, and then at Dominic, who was watching me with those dark eyes that missed nothing and gave even less away, and I felt the enormity of what they’d just handed me sink into my chest, deeper and more permanent than I knew what to do with.
“Tomorrow then,” said Anita, her voice pulling my gaze from them.
“Tomorrow.” I nodded stiffly and then turned to leave.
We moved back through the house the same way we’d come, my eyes forward, and my steps even, letting myself lean into the bond between us instead of shutting it out. I could feel the steady thrum running from Trace and Dominic to me, and for once I didn’t try to push it away.
Everything else was still there. The grief and guilt. The knowledge of what tomorrow was going to cost us. None of that had changed. But for the first time since this started, I wasn’t drowning in it. I felt like I could finally breathe. Like maybe, against every odd that had ever been stacked against me, we were actually going to fix this.
I was almost at the door when Annabelle’s voice followed us out.
“Try to get some sleep you three,” she called out, her tone somewhere between sincere and sardonic, which with her was basically the same thing. “You’re going to war with the Order of the Rose using nothing but stolen time and a borrowed spell.” A beat. “You’ll want to be rested.”
I didn’t answer her.
The bitch wasn’t wrong.
46. EVERY LAST MINUTE
After leaving the Roderick sisters, we drove back through Salem until Dominic spotted a hotel he deemed acceptable, which apparently required floor-to-ceiling glass, a city view, and a bar cart that didn’t insult him.
And of course, he booked the penthouse suite. Because why wouldn’t he? It was the kind of room that made you feel like a different person the moment you walked into it. Glass paneling on every wall, a long stretch of city skyline bleeding into the horizon, and furniture so clean and expensive-looking it probably cost more than the Blackburn Estate’s entire east wing. After the last couple of days we’d had, it felt disorienting in the best way possible.
I made it approximately four steps inside before my legs made the decision for me. I dropped onto the nearest couch, tipped sideways, and let the cushions swallow me whole.
Trace drifted toward the window, standing in the dim of the room with his hands in his pockets, looking out over the city as though his head were somewhere else entirely, turning something over in his mind, probably running it to the ground.
Dominic, predictably, made a beeline for the room’s private bar.
I watched him from the couch as he uncapped a bottle and set down two glasses, unhurried and completely at ease, like a man who had never once in his life felt out of place anywhere he chose to stand. There was something deeply comforting about that. About both of them. Trace holding his vigil at the window. Dominic already commandeering the bar like he owned it. The two of them settling into the roomthe way they settled into everything. Completely, and without question. Filling every corner of it until there was no space left for anything dark to creep in.
It had been a long few days. Years, really, if I was being honest with myself. But for the first time in forever, it felt like all the madness and destruction had been building toward something rather than just swallowing me whole. Like every wrong turn and close call and thing I’d survived had been nudging me, however brutally, toward something so much bigger than me. That there had been a reason to all of it, even the parts that had nearly broken me.
I didn’t understand all of it yet, but I wasn’t sure I needed to. As terrified as I was about what we were going to do tomorrow, about what we were up against, it still felt like exactly where I was supposed to be. Like tomorrow was going to be the beginning of the rest of our lives. For better or worse.
