Page 150 of Incoronate
“No, he’s okay,” I confirmed, thanking my lucky stars that at least I didn’t have that to contend with. “But I’m from a different future. I’m not the one that visited you that day. That future’s gone,” I said, taking a step toward her as she folded her arms across her chest. “The version you met before, wherever she came from, that Timeline doesn’t exist anymore. This is different.”
“Different how?”
“They’ll explain everything when you get there.” I closed the remaining distance between us. “All of it. I promise.”
Her eyes narrowed. “They?”
I was referring to the Roderick sisters, but I didn’t bother saying that part out loud. She’d find out soon enough, and the last thing I wanted was to give her a reason to pull back now.
“Just remember, you can trust them,” I said and then reached out and took her hand.
The transfer hit like a struck bell. A single resonant pulse rang out from the talisman at my neck and moved through every nerve ending I had. For one breathless, suspended moment I felt both of us occupying the same point in time. Two versions of the same girl standing at the crossroads, the Timeline straining around us like fabric pulled past its limit.
Then something gave.
A seam releasing after holding on too long. The spell pulled my past self away from me, drawing her into the dark void that would carry her into the Timeline I’d just vacated.
And with that, she was gone.
Off to a future she hadn’t asked for and didn’t yet understand, so that I could do what needed to be done to stop it from ever becoming real.
I stood in the center of my bedroom and let the stillness gather around me. I glanced at the clock on the end table. Trace and Dominic would be back any minute now. All I had to do was hold my nerve until they did.
I drew in a shallow breath, but it did nothing to quell the rising anticipation.
Everything was going to change tonight. One way or another. I didn’t care if it was the last thing I ever did on either Timeline, I was going to make sure that the people I loved were safe. And that Ares was going to have the long life he deserved and the chance to grow into whoever he was going to be, on his own terms, without the Order’s shadow falling over every step he took.
The Order had moved through the world unchecked for far too long. Generation after generation, the Council doing their quiet, ruinous work, dismantling everything that stood against them and burying the evidence so deep that by the time anyone noticed, it was already too late.
They had taken so much more than my father. They had reached into my life with both hands and stripped it down to bone, and every time I had trusted them, believed there was still some version of justice that could be negotiated through the right channels, they had used that trust to strike at me.
Once upon a time I had vowed to burn them down for what they’d done to my father. And then I’d hesitated. Let grief become inertia, let love talk me into mercy, let myself believe that restraint was the same thing as wisdom. And they had struck, again and again, every time I left them the opening.
But my eyes were wide open now.
They were nothing but snakes. Every last one of them. The most poisonous in the garden, dressed up in authority and propriety and the language of the greater good. They had looked at me and seen something manageable. Containable. And when I refused to be either of those things, they had tried to eradicate me instead. But they made a fatal error. Because in all their scheming and maneuvering and careful, calculated dominion, they had done the one thing that cannot be undone. They had taken everything from a girl with nothing left to lose and nowhere left to be reasonable, and in doing so, they had built exactly the weapon they had always feared.
The very weapon that was going to destroy them.
Because I was Lucifer’s daughter. Devil blood and dark power and an inheritance that ran deeper than anything the Order had ever had to reckon with. But I was also Thomas Blackburn’s daughter by every other measure that mattered. He had raised me to love fiercely and fight harder and never, ever stop. Both of those things lived inside me, the darkness and the devotion, and I was done trying to keep them separate.
The part of me that had spent years apologizing for what I was, trying to stay on the right side of a line the Order had drawn for their own convenience, was gone. What remained didn’t flinch at the dark. Didn’t recoil from it or bargain with it or dress it up in justification. It simply recognized it for what it was. My birthright. And for the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of what I might become if I stopped fighting it.
I knew what I had to do.
I had known since Arianna leaned close and put the words in my mind without moving her lips. Since my father told me providence remains. Since a little boy with my gray eyes stood under a red sky and told me to go back and make it right. Maybe even long before that.
There was only one way to put an end to this. To end their reign of terror and the chokehold they had kept on this world for centuries. To make sure they could never again do what they did to my family to anyone else. And there was only one way to do that.
I had to become what they had always feared most.
The one thing they would never be able to control.
49. A CROWN OF SHADOWS
Thunder rolled in from the east before the rain arrived, a long low warning that moved through the walls of the Blackburn Estate like the longest breath I'd ever held finally being released. By the time the first drops hit the glass, it was coming down hard, drumming against the windows in a cadence that felt less like weather and more like an announcement.
I stood in the center of my bedroom and listened to it, and I thought about the red sky from my dream. About the little boy with gray eyes standing under it, telling me to go back and make it right. About Arianna's lips not moving while she told me what I needed to do to win this.
