Page 167 of Incoronate
I tilted my head.
“But then I got to thinking about you. About the kind of man you are. And I realized that wouldn’t actually be a punishment for you, William. You don’t have what it takes to make it there and you’d take the easy way out. Especially if it means taking everyone in Hollow Hills out with you. That’s what cowards do when they’re cornered. They burn the building down and call it sacrifice.”
His eyes were wet now.
“So I’m going to do something better.” I stood up slowly. “I’m going to put you somewhere you won’t be able to end yourself,” I said, brushing an invisible piece of lint off the front of his cassock the way you might brush dust off something you were donating to charity. “Somewhere your sigils can’t reach. Somewhere your Council can’t find you. A pit so deep in Hades that no one will ever find you again. Deeper than where any of the demons go. Where the light will never reach you. And it’ll be just you, William. Alone. Forever. And I’m going to make sure your heart keeps beating the entire time. Because you’ve got forty thousand souls riding on it, and I can’t have anything happening to you.”
His eyes were screaming.
“No one will hear you. No one will ever come for you. No one will even know you’re down there. You’ll have nothing but yourself and the dark and the very long, very slow understanding of exactly what you spent your life building.”
I leaned down and put my mouth close to his ear.
“Welcome to the smaller part, William,” I said sweetly and then straightened.
The throne hummed in answer the moment I asked. Black smoke poured up around the chair, sealing him in, swirling around the still, frozen shape of him until I couldn’t see his face anymore. I held the image of where I wanted him in my mind. Held it long and clear and without mercy. A tomb. Deep in Hell. Sealed and waiting and watched. Surrounded by the very things he’d spent his life trying to keep buried, every one of them well-acquainted with what their Queen wanted done with him, and what was to be done if he ever stopped breathing.
The smoke pulled inward in a long, silent breath.
And then he was gone.
The chair was empty. The desk was empty. The decanter still sat on the silver tray, untouched. The room was very, very still before I finally turned around.
Trace was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read. Awe and shock and something like reverence, all tangled together in the blue of his eyes. Dominic was leaning back against the doorframe with his arms crossed, his mouth pulled up at one corner, looking at me like I’d just done a magic trick he wanted to learn.
“Don’t worry, he’s alive,” I told them, before either of them could ask. “And he’ll stay that way. The sigils will stay dormant for as long as his heart keeps beating. And his heart will keep beating for as long as I let it.”
Trace’s brow furrowed. “Where did you send him?”
“Where else? A tomb in Hell.”
Dominic’s mouth twitched. “Decorative.”
“The legion knows what to do with him.” I picked up one of the crystal tumblers from the silver tray and turned it slowly between my fingers, watching the firelight move across the cut glass. “They’ll keep him alive. They’ll make sure of it. And if anyone ever stumbles onto him down there and gets clever ideas about ending him, well.” I set the tumbler back down with a soft clink. “They already know exactly what I want done about that too.”
I drew in a breath and looked once more at the empty chair behind William’s desk. At the decanter and the three untouched tumblers and the cassock-shaped impression on the leather where forty years of sermons had left their dent. At the office of a man whose name no one would ever say above a whisper again, and whose heart, at this very moment, was beating against its will somewhere no map would ever find.
I lowered myself into the chair across from his desk. The same one he’d gestured me toward when I’d walked in. The one I’d refused. I let myself feel every inch of the leather under me now, let myself feel the room without him in it, let myself feel the absoluteness of what I’d just done.
Trace took the chair beside mine, his thumb grazing the line of my jaw. “You okay?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
Dominic’s dark eyes followed the movement from across the room. “She’s settling into it,” he said, the dry note in his voice doing a poor job of disguising what was underneath it. “Give her a moment, Romeo. She’s only just figuring out what it feels like to have a man’s pulse on a leash.”
Trace shot him a look that suggested he was approximately one comment away from being introduced to the doorframe at speed, but the corner of my mouth pulledup despite myself, and that was enough to break some of the heaviness in the room.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a part of me that wanted to feel triumphant. The vengeful, devil-blooded part that had been sharpening itself against the inside of my skin for years, finally given its hour. The part of me that craved the darkness, that had crawled out of Sanguinarium with my whole world buried on the other side of the seam, that had wanted nothing in this life more than to see William Thompson pay for every breath he had stolen from the people I loved.
That part of me was satisfied.
But there was another part underneath it. The part of me my dad had raised. The Slayer’s daughter. The girl who had spent her whole life trying to be good in a way the world hadn’t made very much room for. And that part of me knew what the rest of me wasn’t ready to admit just yet.
That this was going to cost me.
Maybe not tonight. Tonight, I’d sleep like the dead between the two of them and not feel a thing. But somewhere in the months and years stretching ahead of me, on some quiet, ordinary night when I had nothing left to do but lie in the dark with my own thoughts, I was going to remember the sound of the chair going still. The pupils flicking. The wetness in his eyes. The form of a man so completely robbed of everything that even his fear had nowhere left to go. And I was going to have to carry it. All of it. Every last inch of what I had done in this room.
That was the price of admission to the throne I had claimed. I had known it when I claimed it. I’d known it walking through the front doors of Temple tonight. I knew it now.
