Page 77 of Incoronate
I paused on the doorstep, looking down at the baby cradled in my arms, still wrapped in the blanket the sisters had given him. He was sleeping peacefully against my chest, his tiny ribs rising and falling with the unbothered ease of someone who had no idea he had just been born into the worst storm any of us had ever faced.
He had no idea what waited for him on the other side of the door. No idea what kind of life he had inherited the moment he drew his first breath. But I had promised to protect him, and I intended to keep my word for as long as I had breath in my body to do it.
Pulling in a slow, steadying breath, I pushed the door open.
The sound of it closing echoed through the foyer like a struck bell, and the voices in the living room cut off mid-sentence. A heartbeat passed before footsteps thundered through the house in my direction. Too many of them. Moving too fast.
They reached me all at once, voices climbing over one another as their eyes raked over me for damage I hadn’t mentioned and answers I hadn’t given them yet. Dominiccame last, slower than the others, his expression carefully unreadable as he took in the sight of me standing in the foyer with a sleeping baby in my arms.
“What the fuck happened to you?” demanded Tessa, breaking through the chaos before anyone else could get a word in. Her gaze dropped to the bundle in my arms a second later, and the rest of her question died on her tongue. “And what in the hell is that?”
I scrunched my nose at her. “What does it look like?”
“It looks like a baby,” she snapped, both hands on her hips. “Why is there a baby in your arms?”
“Please tell me that is not the child in question,” warned Gabriel, sounding like he was barely holding himself together as is. Like one more ounce of my shit and he was going to launch himself off a building.
“The child in question…as inTheSon of Perdition?” balked Tessa, her voice climbing an octave.
“That would be the one,” I answered evenly.
“And you have him because…?”
It was a perfectly valid question, and one that deserved the truth.
“Funny you should ask that,” I started nervously, before going on to tell them everything that had happened from the moment I woke up with the voices in my head to the cabin in the clearing. The demons and the dead Horsemen. Nikki dying in that bed while her newborn son slept in my arms. The promise I’d made to her with her last breath. The Roderick sisters’ allegiance.
I told them all of it, the words spilling out in a continuous stream as we slowly made our way to the living room, never once loosening my grip on the baby. He stayed asleep through the entire explanation, his tiny chest rising and falling inperfect rhythm, completely oblivious to the bomb I was dropping on everyone around him.
Once I was through, Gabriel filled me in on what happened at the house after I left. Especially since I had expected to come home to a sleeping house and a couple of soon-to-be-very-pissed-off, incapacitated vampires. It turned out he had gone to check on Tessa and noticed my bedroom door open down the hall. Curious, he’d followed the trail to my room and found Trace and Dominic staked on the floor, incapacitated and helpless, exactly as I had left them.
Of course, I apologized to both of them. Profusely. Over and over until Trace finally cut me off and told me I didn’t need to. That it wasn’t me. That I’d been under the Horsemen’s control and none of it was my fault.
But Dominic. Dominic was harder to read. He hadn’t pulled away from me, not exactly, but he hadn’t fully come back either. There was a guarded distance to him that hadn’t been there yesterday, as if he were still working through what had happened. As if maybe he hadn’t fully forgiven me yet.
I supposed I couldn’t blame him for that.
When I finally finished explaining everything and all the talking was done, a stunned, awkward silence fell over the group. No one seemed to know what to say or what the appropriate response was when your family member came home with the prophesied Son of Perdition bundled in her arms.
Tessa was the first to break it. “So what are you going to do now?”
“Now?” I let out a tired breath. “I’m going to sleep. I can barely keep my eyes open.”
“I meant with the baby,” she clarified, gesturing to the bundle in my arms.
“What do you think I’m doing?” I asked without giving her a chance to answer. “I’m keeping him.”
“What? You can’t just…keep him,” hissed Tessa, though her voice had lost some of its edge. “He’s not some stray puppy you found on the street.”
“Thanks, Tess, but I managed to figure as much on the cab ride over here. And thank god for that, because I almost picked up puppy chow instead of baby formula on the way back.”
“I’m serious, Jemma. He’s the Son of Perdition. Do you have any idea what that means? What raising him will be like?”
“No,” I admitted honestly. “But I know what it’s like to be hunted for something I didn’t choose. To have people look at you and see a monster before they ever see a person. And I’m not going to let him go through that alone.”
“You know the Order will come for him,” said Gabriel, his moss green eyes turning sad. “You’ll never have a moment of peace. They have always seen him as a threat. As something that needs to be eliminated before he can fulfill the prophecy.”
“Then they’ll have to go through me first.”
