Page 168 of Incoronate
I had become something my father would have grieved.
But I had also become something he would have been proud of.
Because I hadn’t done this for vengeance. Not really. Not at the bottom of it. I had done it for Ares. For Tessa. For every name on the long, awful list of people the Order had taken from me, and for every name on the longer list still out there, waiting to be taken. I had done it so that nobody else would have to grow up the way I did. Looking over their shoulder. Apologizing for what their blood was. Asking permission to exist from people who had already decided they shouldn’t.
I had done it for peace.
Not the kind William and his Council had been peddling for centuries. Not William’s manufactured kind that required someone to be beneath someone else, the kind that called itself peace because the screaming was happening somewhere else entirely. I wanted the real thing. The kind that lived between equals. The kind that made room for the Nephilim and the Hadeans and everyone in between, because the Order’s old narrative—that one side was the light and the other side was the dark and the dark had to be eradicated for the light to live—wasn’t a truth I had ever once seen confirmed in real life.
That line had never been where any of them said it was.
I knew, sitting there in the aftermath, that this wasn’t over. That William had been one man, and the Order had been built on centuries of men exactly like him, and somewhere out there, the rest of his Council was already being told what had happened in this office tonight. They would come for me eventually. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but they would come, because that was what they did.
The difference was, this time, I would be ready for them.
This time, I had an army of my own.
This time, I was the thing they were going to have to negotiate with.
And I was going to fight, tooth and nail and blood and bone, for the kind of peace that didn’t require my baby brother to grow up afraid of his own shadows. The kind that didn’t demand the destruction of one side for the other to feel safe. I would bargain for it, threaten for it, kill for it if it ever came to that, but I was going to make them sit down at a table they had spent a thousand years refusing to share.
It was going to be a long road. Maybe my whole life. Maybe Ares’s whole life after mine.
But I had time.
I had a throne, and an army, and the two men currently watching over me without saying a word and family and friends who loved me fully. That was more than I had ever thought I would get, and it was more than enough.
I drew in a breath, let it out, and rose from the chair.
Trace’s hand slid down to mine and squeezed once before letting go as Dominic pushed off the doorframe but didn’t move toward the corridor yet. I already knew without looking that they were both watching me, waiting to see what I was going to do next.
I crossed back around to William’s side of the desk. The phone sat where he’d left it, neat and ordinary and exactly where it had always been. A black landline with a row of programmed speed dials running down the side of the receiver. I scanned them once, my eyes landing on the one labeled simply with a single letter in his careful, fastidious hand.
The man William had answered to. The man whose name only ever appeared in whispers, even within the Council itself. The man who had sat at the top of the Order long before William ever rose to Senior Magister, and who would,until tonight, have considered himself the last word on what happened to me.
G.M.
Grand Magisterium.
“One down,” I said as I picked up the receiver and pressed the key.“However many want to try meleft to go.”
53. EVERYTHING WORTH KEEPING
In the days that followed, the world quieted down in a way I hadn’t ever dared to imagine it could.
The Order had signed the truce much faster than I had expected them to. By the third morning, the Council had convened, weighed their options, and arrived at the only conclusion left available to them. Which was that the new Queen of Hades had a hundred demons standing on each of their lawns and could put a hundred more there with the lift of a finger. They didn’t need me to explain what I was capable of doing if they refused. They’d seen what happened to William.
The initial terms were simple enough. My life was no longer theirs to interfere with, and neither were the lives of the people I loved. The moment any of them moved against my family or anyone who mattered to me, they would all pay for it. Not just the one who pulled the trigger. All of them. Their entire bloodlines, if it had to come to it. I would pick them off one by one until there wasn’t a single Anakim left who remembered the name Order of the Rose.
They signed on the dotted line.
I called Tessa on the burner phone that same afternoon, my hands wrapped around a mug of coffee I hadn’t touched, and when she picked up on the first ring I couldn’t remember a single word of what I’d rehearsed.
“It’s over, Tess,” I said, and my voice broke clean in half on her name. “You can come home now.”
They were on a flight back within the day.
The reunion at the airport hit me harder than I’d braced for. I’d spent the whole drive over rehearsing what I wasgoing to say to her, how I was going to explain everything that had happened on the timeline she’d never lived. None of it survived the moment she walked out into the terminal with Ares cradled against her chest and Gabriel close at her shoulder.
