Page 59 of Incoronate
The dining room furniture was still pushed up against the walls from our last training session, the rugs rolled and stacked in the corner, other odds and ends relocated to safer territory. Somewhere along the way, the house had stopped feeling like a refuge and started feeling like a makeshiftsparring hall, stripped down to its bones and repurposed for survival.
A solid hour of relentless drilling later, I was drenched in sweat and my muscles screamed with every movement. Gabriel had been merciless about it too, pushing me through drill after drill until my body moved on pure instinct rather than conscious thought. Considering I’d been bedridden and half-dead twenty-four hours ago, the fact that I was still upright at all was nothing short of a miracle.
He stood across from me now, his arms crossed over his chest, watching as I blocked his latest strike and countered with one of my own. His expression was carefully neutral, stoic even, that familiar mask of calm control firmly back in place since the spell had broken. Gone was the aggressive edge that had been honing him over the past couple of weeks. Gone was the man who had needed to be reined back from the brink of his worst impulses.
I preferred him this way, even if it meant he kept more of himself locked away.
“Good. Again,” he said evenly.
I groaned but reset my stance, raising my hands in front of my face. My arms felt like deadweights, but I kept that part to myself.
Gabriel’s strikes were as clean and efficient as ever, but I could feel them coming a half-second before they landed now. I blocked, ducked, countered. The pattern had become automatic, my body responding before my mind could catch up. But of course, some of them still got through perfectly fine.
He swept my legs out from under me, and I hit the mat hard, the air punching out of my lungs.
“Better,” he said, offering me his hand. “You’re starting to anticipate the movement instead of reacting to it.”
“I’m glad you think so.” I took his hand and let him pull me back up, my legs wobbling slightly beneath me. “Because right now, I just feel like I got hit by a truck.”
“That’s how you know it’s working.” He grabbed a towel from the chair and tossed it to me. “That’s enough for today.”
I caught it gratefully, pressing it against my face as I tried to catch my breath. “Thank god. I don’t think I had another round in me.”
Gabriel’s gaze moved past me to where Trace and Dominic had been watching from the edge of the dining room. They’d been silent observers for the past hour, though I could feel both of them tracking me through the bonds. Trace’s quiet, watchful concern thrumming on one side, and Dominic’s deeper presence resting against me on the other, like a hand braced against the small of my back even from across the room.
“Start working with her on resisting your compulsion,” said Gabriel, the words directed at them. “She needs to learn how to fight it. How to recognize when it’s happening and call on her tethers before it takes hold.”
Dominic’s mouth curved into a pleased smile that was all darkness and delight. “It would be my pleasure.”
Heat crept up my neck before I’d even registered why. Then my brain caught up to what they were proposing, and I nearly choked on the implication of it.
“Wait.” My grip tightened on the towel as Gabriel started toward the doorway. “How exactly is that supposed to—I mean, are you sure this is a good idea?” I squeaked, my stomach fluttering nervously.
“Practicing against Dominic’s compulsion is the best way to prepare you,” answered Gabriel without breaking stride, as though he were explaining something as mundane as stretching after a workout. He picked up his jacket from thechair and headed toward the door. “I’ll be back after I check in on Tessa.”
“Gabriel—!”
But he was already gone, his footsteps echoing down the hallway until they faded completely.
Motherfluffer.
I turned back to Trace and Dominic, my pulse kicking up as I realized we were completely alone again. Before I could say anything, Dominic pushed himself off the wall and stalked toward me with that dark gleam in his eye that always made me question my life choices. His walk was purposeful, almost predatory in a way that made heat coil low in my stomach despite myself.
“I don’t—” I swallowed hard, my mouth suddenly dry. “This feels like a very bad idea.”
Dominic stopped a few feet in front of me. “On the contrary, angel. It’s quite practical.”
I glanced at Trace. He hadn’t moved an inch. He stayed where he was with his arms folded across his chest and his expression unreadable save for the muscle ticking in his jaw. Even so, I could feel the tension coming off him through the bond, restless and uneasy, like a current running just below the surface of his skin. I just wasn’t sure if it was coming from our soulmate bond or the anchor bond or both.
Wetting my lips, I looked back at Dominic. “How do you figure?”
“Because when the Horsemen come for you again, they will not give you a practice run first.” His tone was almost conversational, but his eyes held mine in a way that made my breath catch. “There will be no warning. No time to brace yourself. One moment you will be standing exactly where you are now, and the next, every instinct you have will be screaming at you to obey.”
A chill slid down my spine because I remembered it well. The terrifying feeling of not being in control of my body or mind anymore. Of wanting to destroy something that I knew in the bottom of my heart, where it was just me and my will, that I wanted to do nothing more than protect.
“And losing my will to you is somehow going to help me with that?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him. “Because that feels like…asking for trouble.”
Then again, I never said it would be the bad kind.
