Chapter XXXVII. Domenic
XXXVII
DOMENIC
WINTER
In the apartment lobby, the bellhop stared at the drifting snow outside and worried at his wedding band. The radio crackled a death rattle.
The bellhop didn’t notice the revolving door spin. But he glanced up as the flickering chandelier brightened, and inexplicable warmth pressed against his side. Yet just as suddenly, the cold returned, the lobby dimmed, and Domenic took the private elevator to the penthouse.
He dropped his illusion. His fingers flexed around Valmordion, and even after the elevator halted, he swore the ground swayed beneath him.
A frigid draft wafted from the crack of the doors.
Warily, hopefully, he slipped Valmordion into its sheath.
Then, before he even rang the bell, the doors opened, revealing Ellery. Tear tracks glistened down her cheeks. Like him, she still wore her costume from Alderland’s most disastrous holiday, and—
And she held Iskarius.
“Let me go, Dom,” she warned. “You know we can’t do this here.”
Yet Ellery made no move to stop him as he brushed past her. Despite the flurries outside, her apartment windows were thrown open, and flakes accumulated atop the sills and dusted the floor. The phone dangled off its hook. A suitcase lay open on the carpet.
“And what would we be doing, exactly?” he murmured.
“Do you really need me to say it?”
“Well, if you’re so sure we have to fight, why are you running away?”
“What else would you have me do?” She tilted her head up to look at him, blinking rapidly.
“Do you think I want to run away from the city I love, from the people I only ever wanted to protect? Of course I don’t!
But I’ve been waiting for Summer to come, thinking maybe then, we’d find proof one way or the other.
But Summer didn’t come! That hasn’t happened since the Thirty Years’ Chill.
So if that isn’t a sign of how badly we messed up, I-I don’t know what is. ”
“No. I know it looks bad. Believe me, Summer not coming, I’m terrified, too. But—”
“Don’t. Do you know how many times you’ve gotten my hopes up just to break my heart? So just please, stop. You’re only making it worse for both of us.”
Domenic flinched. But rather than apologize, his response was slow and venomous, as suited the villain of her story.
“Well, I’m glad I broke your heart,” he hissed, leaning down close. “Let’s call it practice for when I stop it.”
Ellery balked. “Really? This is how you want to talk about us killing each other?”
“What, was there another cue card I was supposed to read? Is there a fucking script?” He stalked away and threw up his arms. “Or would it be better to be classy about it? Should we shake hands beforehand? Offer a kiss of good luck?”
“Actually, yes, it’s better that you be an ass about it! Maybe then it won’t hurt so much when you’re dead.”
He barked out a laugh. “Oh, so you assume you’ll kill me?”
“You assumed you’d kill me first. I was only returning the favor.”
“If it was just a matter of you and me, I’d happily let you, dear!”
He must’ve finally said something unforgivable, because Ellery pointed Iskarius at him. Her shadow writhed upon the carpet, and frost glimmered from each of her seething exhales.
Domenic’s mouth went dry with fear. He licked his lips. “So you’d really just ignore what’s left of the prophecy? Skip everything else and go right to the finale? That is so like you.”
“Oh, this ought to be good.”
“You accuse me of making you hope like it’s a bad thing. But of course you think that, because you’d rather believe your life was doomed from the start than admit how badly you want a happy ending.”
Ellery went utterly still.
“Of course I want a happy ending,” she whispered. “But that’s never been our story.”
Domenic glanced outside at the flurries whipping past—a scene that should’ve been Summer. He staggered back as the world blurred, dreamlike. Yet Ellery remained the irrevocable focal point of his vision.
He swallowed, his hand hovering near Valmordion. “I already made my choice. That if we have to do this, I’d choose duty. But even now, it doesn’t feel right.”
“It never will,” Ellery rasped.
“No, i-it’s more than that.” Domenic struggled for the correct words, knowing how pathetic he sounded. There was no honor in denial. “I’ve always known what my magic was, even when I tried to run from it. It’s instinct. But ever since that night in Mercester Square, my instinct has always been…”
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. Ellery’s expression went stricken.
Because of course, her instinct had always been him, too.
Like an explosion of sunlight, a sudden, delirious thought burst within Domenic’s mind. His hope bloomed like it never had. And he gasped at the perfect simplicity of it. The rightness of it. Even his magic responded, smoldering feverishly, until he burned with conviction.
“We’ve always been the same, haven’t we?” he said. “We always know what the other is thinking. We always understand how the other feels. Because we’re the only people who can truly see each other for who we are.”
Ellery’s lips quivered, but she didn’t speak. He could glimpse his hope reflected in her gaze, but there was also pain, far too much of it.
He walked cautiously toward her.
“You think I could’ve slayed Eledrium and Maltherius without you?
You think I could’ve stood up to Sharpe, smiled through any of those interviews, stopped assuming I was a failure, if you hadn’t been there beside me?
The other Chosen Ones might’ve sacrificed themselves to save Alderland.
But destiny didn’t just give us our wands—it gave us each other.
And before I ever believed in destiny, I believed in us. ”
Step after step, he closed the distance between them. He wiped his own watery eyes on his sleeve.
“What if everything we’ve ever felt, everything we’ve spent so long punishing ourselves for, has always been what will save us? What if I save you, and you save me, and we save everyone else?”
He halted before her. Iskarius wobbled in Ellery’s grasp as she pointed it at his throat.
“Yeah, I know how it sounds,” he continued fiercely.
“Here I am, getting your hopes up again! Or worse, I sound like I’ve lost my fucking mind.
And I don’t care! I think we were meant for each other—to be a team, to fall in love, all of it!
Because no matter what parts we got wrong, there’s no version of this story where I don’t fall in love with you. ”
Slowly, tortuously slowly, Ellery lowered Iskarius. Domenic’s chest heaved, in triumph, in relief.
“I love you, too,” she breathed.
Then Ellery dropped the wand, and they broke toward each other.
Their mouths met, their kiss urgent and desperate and slick with tears, and Domenic crushed her against him until not an inch separated them, until not one force could’ve divided them.
Immediately, Winter streamed through his veins like ice water, and he shuddered as his every nerve ignited.
Even with his eyes closed, he saw color, thousands and thousands of shades of it.
A future so vibrantly, undeniably bright.
He couldn’t fathom how he’d never seen it before.
Of course Ellery Caldwell was his destiny.
For if he had been made for anything, it was her.
Her magic ran in his marrow. Her thumbprint was branded into his heart.
And years and years from now, when his body lay to rest in the woods somewhere and fate had had its fill, they would know him, not from the wand frozen at his side, but from her name carved into his bones.
That would come closer to the truth than any movie or monument could dare aspire.
And that truth would be more than enough for him.
Wind blustered through the open window and whirled around them as they twined together.
Its snowflakes glittered in Ellery’s lashes, melted and steamed against Domenic’s skin.
Her fingers fumbled over the buttons of his vest, and Domenic shrugged off his suit jacket, bending so as not, for even a morsel of a second, to part his lips from hers.
She moved onto his shirt collar next, and chills swept across him as the frigid air met his bare chest. Gently, he tugged at the straps of her dress, and he watched it ripple over the crests of her shoulders and fall, lost, into the umbra of her shadow.
The slip beneath was petal-thin, and as his hands skimmed over where it hugged the slopes of her hips, he marveled that, in all the scenarios he’d contemplated when he’d come here, never had he considered this one, the only one imaginable, the only one inevitable.
Then, with his face cupped in her hands, Ellery guided him down the hallway. He stumbled, but he didn’t dare draw away. Not even as they laughed at their clumsiness, at their euphoria.
The lamp on the nightstand brightened as Domenic sat on the bed.
Even as he reached toward her, the pads of his fingers just barely brushing the silk of her slip, she didn’t move to him.
She hovered there, her gaze roaming over his face.
He knew his magic must be obvious, embers aglow in his eyes no different than her bright, unnatural blue.
But he lifted his chin boldly, letting her study him.
It was a relief not to prove himself. It was a relief to be beheld.
He smiled, and so did she.
Finally, she lowered onto him. Her fingers slid through his hair until she grasped ahold of him and tilted back his head.
Her mouth met the pulse point beneath his jaw.
He squeezed her thighs at both his sides, dizzy with the sensation of how soft she was.
Of his hips crushed against hers. Of her cold so near his throat.
And as her lips trailed down the hollow of his neck, his hands coaxed up the hem of her slip.
He relished the sound Ellery uttered as he drew a slow, sinuous pattern across every curve of her, every groove of her spine.
Until his hands found her back, and, holding her close, he laid her upon the sheets.
Her hair cascaded around his face. Her tongue grazed his own.
It was so easy to get lost in this, in her.
But he knew how little time they could spare, that not even he had the power to draw a curtain over the sun and grant them a whole, perfect night.
Besides, he didn’t want to rush. Because the truth was, despite the lurid gossip surrounding Domenic Barrow, he’d only ever slept with two people.
And the first time, it’d been based only on the assumption that it was not his first time, and he hadn’t been brave enough to correct her.
After that, there no longer seemed a point in being precious.
Neither of those instances felt remotely like this.
Not that Ellery knew that history. And yet, as she grasped his belt buckle, he felt her whisper against his ear, “Is this all right?”
He drew away to look at her. “Of course it is.” His breath fogged in the air. “Even if we were Chosen, I choose you. I’ll always choose you.”
“I’ll always choose you, too,” she echoed, without hesitation.
As time eddied past and fate kept course, one by one, lights blackened across the skyline. But Domenic didn’t notice.
It was perfect all the same.