Page 166 of Incoronate
“You’re a coward, William.”
“I beg your pardon,” he barked, angry.
“You heard me. You’re a coward. You always have been.” My voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to. “You dress it up in scripture and prophesy and call it duty and pretend you’ve been carrying some great weight, but at the end of the day, every single decision you’ve ever made has been about saving your own skin. The smaller part for the greater good is just the line you tell yourself so you can sleep at night. And the smaller part is always somebody else.”
His face had gone very still.
“I should have expected nothing less,” I said softly. “The whole time I thought I was negotiating with a fanatic. I was actually negotiating with a gutless man who was just very good at finding ways to save his own ass.”
“You are out of your depth, little girl.”
“Am I?”
He sat forward slightly in his chair, the cassock bunching at his shoulders. “You will not call my bluff, Jemma. The cost is too high.”
“Oh, I’m not calling your bluff.”
His pale eyes flickered.
“I know you’re not bluffing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I felt the sigils. I can practically smell the water. I know exactly what happens the moment your heart stops.” I leaned back in slightly. “Which is why your heart isn’t going to stop.”
The silence that fell over the office was different than before. Sharper. The silence of a man who had just heard a sentence he had not accounted for.
“What did you say?”
“Did I stutter?” I smiled.
The smug certainty I had been waiting to see crack finally cracked. Just a hairline split, just a fraction of a second, just long enough to see the calculation start running again behind his eyes.
My smile widened.
And then I called the throne.
It came up through me without effort, black smoke threading out of my fingertips and across the desk like a slow tide, the gold inside it veined and bright. I felt it move through the room and find him. I felt the moment it reached him, the way he stiffened in the chair, the way his fingers curledagainst the arms of it, the way the air around him simply…stopped.
His mouth was still open. His eyes were still mine. His chest had stopped moving, but the throne was holding it. Holding all of him. Every cell, every breath, every twitch of muscle, every electrical impulse running between his brain and his heart, paused in place exactly the way I wanted it.
His heart, of course, kept beating.
The sigils stayed dormant.
Trace cursed under his breath as Dominic let out a sound that was almost a laugh.
I walked around the desk slowly, my fingers trailing along its edge until I came to stop directly in front of his frozen body. His eyes followed me. He couldn’t move anything else, but the eyes were still his, and I could see the moment he understood fully. The moment he realized he had been outmatched in every way that counted, by the very thing he had spent his whole life trying to prevent from happening.
He’d accounted for me killing him. He’d accounted for me threatening him. He’d accounted for every move I was theoretically capable of making with the magic he was used to fighting against. He hadn’t accounted for me doing the unthinkable and claiming the throne.
I crouched in front of his chair so we were eye-level.
“Hi, William.”
His pupils flicked. The only movement he had left.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully,” I said, my voice low like I was whispering a dirty secret to him, “because I’m only going to explain this to you once. Your sigils are still up. Your water is still safe. Your forty thousand souls are going to wake up tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and every morning after that, because your heart is going to keepbeating for as long as I want it to. Which is going to be a very, very long time.”
His eyes searched mine, panicked gripping them.
“I’ve been thinking about what to do with you,” I went on. “At first I thought I’d just dust you. Cinderdust. Send you to Sanguinarium, the same hellscape you tried to condemn me to. Let you spend eternity wandering around in that bleeding sky with the rest of the bodies you put there. Nobody finds you. Nobody comes for you. Nobody even remembers your name down there.”
