Page 169 of Incoronate
Tessa saw me first. She stopped where she stood, her eyes filling before mine did, and I crossed the distance because I wasn’t sure my legs were going to work for very much longer if I made her come to me.
“It’s really over?” she breathed when I reached her, her voice small and unsteady in a way it almost never was.
I nodded as I leaned in to hug her. “It’s really over.”
Gabriel met my eyes over her shoulder and gave me a single nod, the kind he saved for moments that didn’t need anything else, the kind that said I never doubted you without him having to find a single word for it. And Ares, with no idea what any of it meant, reached for a fistful of my hair the moment I came close enough to grab and held on like he’d been waiting his whole short life for the chance.
In that moment I knew that every last thing I had done to get back to them had been worth it, and I felt it all the way down to the bones of me.
The first night after claiming the throne was the worst of it. I’d been afraid to fall asleep, terrified of what would find me once I closed my eyes, bracing for the dreams I knew would come since the moment I felt the dome shatter and the line of Hadean succession close over me like a cathedral door.
And, of course, they came.
But they weren’t nightmares exactly. They were something stranger than that. I dreamed in languages I didn’t speak and of fire that didn’t burn out. Of long halls with no end and a chair at the heart of it that was already mine before I sat down. I dreamed the architecture of places I’d neverbeen and would never go, and a hundred small movements happening in the dark all at once, demons drifting through my sleep the way thoughts drift through anyone else’s, presenting themselves to me in turn and waiting to be acknowledged. I woke up in pieces. In waves. Each time gasping a little harder than the last.
Trace had been on his side facing me, the bond between us already pulled tight before I’d fully come back to myself. Dominic had been awake against my back, one arm braced low across my waist as though he’d been holding me there for hours. They didn’t ask questions. They didn’t make me explain it. Trace just pressed his forehead against mine and breathed with me until I matched him, and Dominic didn’t move from where he was, his palm flat against my stomach, anchoring me to the bed and to the room and to myself.
The throne remained when I woke. There was no leaving it now, no setting it down at the foot of the bed when daylight came. There was a low, constant hum that lived at the base of my spine, something I’d eventually stop noticing the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. With it came an awareness I couldn’t fully shut out, a knowing of every supernatural creature within a hundred miles and what flavor their fear took, whether they were thinking about me or trying very hard not to. A sense, when I closed my eyes, that the dark behind my lids wasn’t just my own anymore.
For a long time, I waited for it to feel like a violation. For the part of me that came from Lucifer to start asking for things I wasn’t willing to give.
But it never did.
What I came to understand, slowly, in the weeks that followed, was that the dark thing in me had never been a separate thing at all. It wasn’t something that had been done to me. It was something I had finally stoppedresisting. Something I had spent my whole life pretending I could outrun, outgrow, out-pray, out-good. Something every Magister and Sentinel and self-righteous Anakim with an opinion had taught me to be ashamed of long before I’d understood what they were really afraid of. It had always been there, waiting, patient as a held breath, the part of me that had always run a little too dark and a little too deep for anyone’s liking, including my own. All the throne had done was give it a place to stand. A name. A purpose. A reason for existing in the world that wasn’t apology.
And once I stopped flinching from it, it stopped feeling like losing myself and started feeling like finally meeting myself, after a lifetime of waiting in the wings.
The weeks after that passed in a strange, ordinary kind of blur. I finished my senior year by the skin of my teeth, mostly because Tessa refused to let me drop out and threatened to physically drag me to graduation in my underwear if I didn’t show up under my own power. She was insufferable about it, but I loved her so much I let her win.
I went to prom with both Trace and Dominic on my arms, in a sunburnt orange dress Annabelle had picked out and Anita had hemmed up the back of, and despite the staring and the whispering and the way the dance floor cleared a three-foot circle around me wherever I stood, I had the absolute time of my life.
Some days I caught myself missing the luxury of being overlooked. Of moving through a room without watching people map the exits, without feeling conversations thin out the moment I stepped too close. There had been a time when I would have given almost anything to be feared instead of pitied, to be powerful enough that no one ever looked at me and saw prey again. I had that now. And most days, I was grateful for it.
But power had a shape, and people felt it even when they didn’t understand what they were feeling. There was a darkness in me now, threaded under my skin and bone and muscle, and it made people hesitate. They lowered their voices when I walked into rooms. They didn’t hold my eye for too long. They sensed something in me they couldn’t quite place and made the very reasonable decision to keep their distance from it.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting at first.
But what I had now was bigger than what they could see. Bigger than anything I’d lost. And I’d stopped expecting the world to understand the trade.
Trace and Dominic stayed every step of the way.
I’d stopped asking them if they were sure this was what they wanted, by then. Stopped checking in to see if it was too much. If the throne and the wings and the dark thing in me were enough to send them running. It wasn’t. I knew it the way I knew my own name now. They loved me the way I loved them. Completely. Without conditions. Well past the point where either of them was capable of walking away. Every time I caught myself reaching for the old questions, I made myself put them down. They weren’t leaving. They had never been leaving. The faith they’d earned out of me had become the kind that didn’t need to be tested anymore.
There were still things I didn’t know.
I didn’t know how long the truce would hold. I didn’t know what the world would look like in ten years, or twenty, or fifty. I didn’t know if the Council would keep their word once the next generation came up and forgot what their grandfathers had seen on their lawns the night I claimed the throne. I didn’t know what new threats were out there, in the corners of the Realms none of us were watching yet. I didn’t know if thethrone would demand things of me one day that I wasn’t ready to give.
I didn’t know any of it.
What I did know was that Ares wasn’t going to grow up the way I did.
He wasn’t going to learn what he was from a stranger in a black cassock. He wasn’t going to lie awake at night counting the people who wanted him dead. He wasn’t going to spend his childhood looking over his shoulder, waiting for the next attempt on his life. Which was why I was building him a school. Not in Hollow Hills. Somewhere the Order’s old maps would never think to look. A place for the children who came into the world the way Ares did. With too much blood in their veins and not enough room in any one Realm to hold it. A place that taught them what they were before the world had the chance to teach them what they were supposed to be afraid of.
The Roderick sisters were helping me with the wards. Anita had promised the foundation would be laid on bones older than the Order itself, woven from magic that pre-dated anyone who might one day come looking. I had already chosen the land. I had already started drawing the floorplans.
It was going to take years, but someday soon when Ares was old enough, he would walk through its doors and he would never have to look over his shoulder again.
That was my promise to him.
