Chapter 43
Somewhere between the living room and Dominic’s bed, I lost a few hours.
One moment I was in the living room with the storm breaking against the windows and my mother’s voice still ringing in my ears, and then somehow I was here, curled on my side in the center of his bed, my knees drawn up to my chest and my hands pressed together under my cheek like I was praying.
As if that had ever done me any good.
I didn’t know how long I’d been lying there but I knew it was long enough for the storm to settle. Long enough for crying to burn itself out and my throat to go raw and my body to stop feeling like something that belonged to me.
My eyes still hurt. They’d been hurting for hours—swollen and raw and scraped hollow from the inside out, the skin around them tight and tender in a way that told me I’d been crying long after I thought I’d run out of anything left to cry with.
I hadn’t even felt it happening. That was the worst part.
The grief had moved through me so completely that at some point it had stopped feeling like feeling at all and started feeling like weather.
Like something happening to me from the outside.
Like I was just standing in it, getting rained on, with no reason to believe it was ever going to stop.
And it didn’t. Not for a long time.
The hours came and went without sound or ceremony, indifferent to the audacity of continuing at all. Trace and Dominic had been beside me the whole time, consoling me, taking turns saying things that never came through.
I couldn’t hear them through my grief, but I could feel it the way you felt sunlight through closed curtains, present and close, but not quite reaching.
At some point one of them had been sitting against the headboard with a hand in my hair.
At another point the other had been at the edge of the bed, his voice low and patient, with enough worry in it that it hurt to register even through the fog.
Please eat something.
Talk to us.
Look at me, angel. Please look at me.
But I didn’t look. I couldn’t. I had nothing to give them, and nothing left to receive. There was only this emptiness, deep and hollow and endless, a space inside my chest so wide it felt like the rest of me was just echoing around it. It had no floor. No end. No bottom to push off from.
I stared at the dark wall as haunting images of my sister flashed through my mind.
The way she’d held Ares the first time I put him in her arms, looking at me from over his head with that expression—the one where she pretended to be annoyed but wasn’t.
Where I knew she was saying, without saying it, that she was in.
That wherever this was going, she was coming with me.
Because despite all the arguments and yelling matches and pissing contests, she had always been there with me. Always backed me up. Always willing to die on whatever hill I was planning to climb next.
She was supposed to be alive and glowing and packing up our bags together so we could leave this godforsaken town with the men we loved and never again look back.
Gabriel was supposed to be downstairs, ready to take on whatever life decided to throw at us. Calm in the way I had never managed to be. Certain in the way that cost him everything.
And Ares. He was supposed to have a life. A whole one. Long and hard and full of things none of us could have predicted. He’d been given nothing. Not even enough time to find out what he might have been.
The Order had taken all of it.
My father. My home. My Keeper. My sister and my brother. They’d burned it all down until there was nothing left but ash and ghosts and the pieces of me that hadn’t died yet only because they hadn’t gotten around to it.
But they would.
The moment they found out I was still alive, they’d come back and finish the job.
They always came back. They always found a way.
And they weren’t going to stop—not for negotiations, not for reason or mercy, not for anything—because that wasn’t how the Order worked.
They’d already killed Tessa and Gabriel and an innocent baby who hadn’t even learned to recognize the sound of his own name yet, let alone done a single bad thing to anyone.
And they would kill Trace and Dominic too.
The second they got the chance, they would take them from me too. They were never going to stop coming until there was nothing left to come for. Until I was dead and buried and six feet under. And maybe that’s where I belonged. Maybe that’s where my story was always supposed to end.
But if I was going down, I wasn’t going quietly. If this was how it ended, then I was going to set the whole world on fire and take every last one of them with me.
Something began to stir underneath the grief. Something that wasn’t grief at all.
I wanted them dead. All of them. I wanted it more than I wanted to be alive, more than I wanted anything, and it was the clearest and most honest thing I had felt since my mother said those four words to me over the sound of breaking rain.
They should have been dead already. I should have made sure of it a long time ago. But I’d hesitated. I’d backed down. I’d tried to do it the right way, the civil way, the measured way, the way that let me sleep at night and still believe I was one of the good ones.
And now three more of the people I loved were dead because of it. But I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.
If my life in Hollow Hills had taught me anything, it was that the good guys always finished last. They paid the highest price.
They got their family’s slaughter while being forced to watch their loved ones got picked off one by one.
And if that was what being the hero meant—if that was the cost of playing by the rules in a game that had never had any—then I wanted no part of it.
Not anymore.
I’d been so afraid of what I would become if I let myself be what I was, so afraid of the dark in me and what it would do if I stopped fighting it, that I had given the Order the only thing they’d ever actually needed from me.
Time. If only I would have had the guts to be the Daughter of Hades they’d always feared instead of the girl who kept apologizing for it, maybe they’d still be alive.
Maybe. But I’d never know now. Because as much as I wanted to go back and do it all over, to go back and make it right, I knew I—
The thought stopped as my mind caught on something sharp. Something I couldn’t immediately place.
Make it right…
The words replayed in my head as an old and distant memory resurfaced. No. Not a memory.
A dream.
A raven called out above us, its voice echoing through the red sky before diving down to the ground beside me.
“Did you see that?” I asked Trace, but he was still staring forward, talking to himself in voiceless riddles.
I turned back to the raven and found Dominic kneeling in its place, the strange sky illuminating him in all the right ways. He stood up and reached out to me, stroking my cheek with the back of his fingers, letting me know everything was going to be okay. But I knew it was a lie.
“What’s going on?” I asked them, but neither one responded. “Why won’t anyone answer me?”
“This isn’t their time,” said a small voice from behind.
I turned toward the sound; a little boy no more than eight or nine years old. His dark hair was parted to the side, and his eyes were a familiar shade of gray.
“What does that mean?” I asked him, bending down to meet him where he stood. “Whose time is it?”
“Yours.”
I shook my head. “I don’t understand.”
“You have to go back. You have to make it right.”
“Go back where? Make what right?”
“The answers you seek are right where you are,” he said, pointing over my shoulder into the horizon.
I followed his gaze down the abandoned street. “There’s nothing out there,” I said, looking back at him. But he was already gone.
You have to go back…
You have to make it right…
The words moved through me like electricity, over and over, until they weren’t just words anymore. Until they were something I could feel in my bones, something that had been waiting since the very beginning to be understood.
And then it hit me. Not slowly. Not like a thought quietly arriving, but like a door being kicked open.
The boy’s eyes. That familiar shade of gray I had seen somewhere before, somewhere recent, somewhere that had nothing to do with a dream from years ago.
Ares.
I snapped upright.
The covers fell away as the room crashed back into focus all at once—the dark walls, the low light bleeding in from the hallway, the two of them already moving, already watching me, because they had never once looked away.
Dominic was on the edge of the bed beside me before I’d finished sitting up.
Trace was on his knees at the side of it, both hands braced on the mattress, his blue eyes searching my face with the careful intensity of someone who had been waiting a long time for me to come back.
Who would spend his life waiting if that was what it took.
Everything clicked into place at once, clean and irreversible, like tumblers turning in a lock.
There was no deliberating. No weighing it up.
Every part of me had already decided before I’d even opened my mouth, and the certainty of it was so complete it felt less like a choice and more like something I was simply catching up to.
“What is it, angel?” said Dominic.
“I know what I have to do.” I looked between them, my voice far steadier than it had any right to be as something cold and certain pressed down into my chest, filling the space where my grief had been. “I have to go back.”
They exchanged a quick, worried look, as though I had sprung up out of the bed and started talking gibberish.
“Go back where?” asked Trace carefully, the shadows in the room catching the blue of his eyes and turning them dark, unreadable, the color of deep water before a storm.
“To the past,” I said, the words scraping on the way out. “I have to go back to where this started. To the night the Order came for us. I have to go back and fix it.”