Page 163 of Incoronate
He didn’t stand when we walked in. “Jemma.”
“William.”
His gaze moved past me to Trace, then to Dominic, lingering for a beat on each before returning to me. “I asked you to come alone.”
“And I told you no.”
“Yes.” His mouth pulled into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “You did.”
He gestured to the three chairs arranged in a neat semicircle in front of his desk. A small side table sat at the elbow of the middle chair, and on it, three crystal tumblers had been arranged on a silver tray. An open decanter stood beside them, half-full of something amber.
“Please. Sit. We have much to discuss.”
I didn’t move.
Neither did Trace. Neither did Dominic.
“Forgive me if I’m not in the mood for hospitality,” I said.
“As you wish.” His hand dropped back to the desk. “Then we’ll dispense with the pleasantries.”
He sat back in his chair, and his hands folded again, his eyes settling on mine with a weight I wasn’t prepared for. He looked tired. He looked old. He looked like a man preparing to deliver the most important sermon of his life.
“You are about to do something terrible, Jemma.”
“I’m about to do something necessary.”
“They are not always different things.”
I crossed my arms. “Are we really going to do this? You’re going to lecture me on moral philosophy, here, now, with your blood already on my hands?”
“My blood is not on your hands yet.”
“It will be.”
“Yes,” he agreed quietly as if he’d already seen it. “It will.”
The simple acceptance of it threw me. I had been ready for argument. For appeals. For the slow, careful manipulations that William had spent the entirety of our acquaintance using to get me to do exactly what he wanted me to do. I had not been ready for him to simply look me in the eye and acknowledge that he was about to die.
I forced myself to hold his gaze.
“You think I’m wrong,” I said.
“I think you are doing what you believe you must,” he answered. “I think you are, in your way, exactly what we feared you would become. But I have lived long enough to know that the line between the protector and the destroyer is thinner than either of them ever wants to admit.” He paused. “I have spent my life on one side of that line. You are about to spend the rest of yours on the other. The view is not as different as you might imagine.”
“Spare me.” I uncrossed my arms. “You sat in this office while my father bled out. You sat in this office and decidedthat the daughter of a Council member was an acceptable casualty. You sat in this office and signed off on Alford burning my mother’s house down with everything I had left of my dad inside it. Don’t you dare pretend you and I are standing on the same line.”
His expression didn’t change.
“Your father was a good man.”
“Don’t,” I warned.
“He was the very best of us. And he believed, until the day he died, that the system he served could be reformed from within. That patience and faith and quiet, persistent work would, eventually, deliver the changes he wanted. He was wrong. The Order does not bend that way. It never has.”
“Don’t you fucking dare talk about my father.”
A small, dry smile touched his lips. “I imagine that is what you intend to do as well. Burn it all down and rebuild it in your image.”
