Chapter 49
Thunder rolled in from the east before the rain arrived, a long low warning that moved through the walls of the Blackburn Estate like the longest breath I'd ever held finally being released.
By the time the first drops hit the glass, it was coming down hard, drumming against the windows in a cadence that felt less like weather and more like an announcement.
I stood in the center of my bedroom and listened to it, and I thought about the red sky from my dream. About the little boy with gray eyes standing under it, telling me to go back and make it right. About Arianna's lips not moving while she told me what I needed to do to win this.
Everything since the moment I arrived in Hollow Hills had been leading up to this one moment.
And I was finally ready.
My attention turned to the door as Trace walked in first, peering around the room before landing on me. A few seconds later Dominic appeared, adjusting his shirt collar as he closed the door behind himself.
“Everyone good to go?” asked Trace, referring to whether we’d all completed our transfers.
“Past-me didn’t suspect a thing,” said Dominic, his eyes moving over my face with that meticulous attention of his that missed nothing and gave back even less. “I must say, I was rather disappointed in myself.”
Trace ignored him, keeping his attention on me instead. “How about you?”
I nodded and looked up at him. “The transfer went off without a hitch.”
“Good,” he said and then pushed his hands through his hair, clearing the view before folding his arms along his chest. “So, what’s our next move?”
I chewed the inside of my cheeks and looked between them again. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Why do I have the distinct feeling I’m not going to like this?” asked Dominic, taking a slow step toward me, crowding my space and thoughts in one single move.
"Because you probably won't," I said. "At least not at first."
Neither of them said anything. They just waited, the way they always did when they knew pushing me would only make me dig in. Outside, the rain climbed harder against the glass.
I drew in a breath and made myself say it.
“I made you a promise once,” I said, my eyes finding Dominic first. “That I’d come to you before I did anything stupid.
So this is me, coming to you.” My gaze moved to Trace.
“To both of you. Because I’m about to do the most stupid, reckless thing I’ve ever done in my life, and I’m not going to do it without your blessing. ”
Trace’s brows drew together as he cursed under his breath. “Jemma…”
“Just hear me out. Please.” I held up a hand. “Then I'll listen to whatever you have to say.”
Dominic gestured for me to continue, his expression giving nothing away.
I rolled my shoulders back and made myself look at them. At the men I loved. The men I was about to ask to follow me straight into the dark.
“I’ve been thinking about it since the moment Arianna whispered those words into my mind.
About what it would mean. What it would cost.” I pressed my lips together for a beat.
“And I keep arriving at the same place. The Order is never going to stop. They didn’t stop after my father.
They didn’t stop after they tried to kill me or after they sent us to Sanguinarium.
They didn't stop until they killed my sister and Ares while we were trapped in a Realm we were never supposed to come out of.” My throat tightened, but I pushed past it.
“And they're going to try to do it all over again now. They won't stop until there’s nothing of us left to hunt.”
“Angel—”
“You know it’s true, Dominic. They’re not going to stop. Ever. The only way to stop them is to make sure they can’t.”
“And how exactly do you intend to do that?”
I held his gaze. “By claiming my birthright.”
Trace’s whole body went still. “You’re going to take the throne? Of Hades?”
“I need an army, Trace. Not just to protect myself but to protect Ares. And this is the only way.”
“There has to be another way.”
Trace turned away and dragged both hands through his hair, his shoulders cording with tension. He paced two steps toward the window, then back, the rain throwing thin shadows down his face. “Do you have any idea what you’re saying? What that would make you?”
“Yes,” I said quietly. “I do.”
“Lucifer’s heir. Queen of Hades. You’d be tied to it forever. You’d be tied to him forever. Everything he was, everything he stood for, all of it would be yours to carry.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know.” His voice cracked at the edge of it. “You can’t know. There’s no coming back from something like that, Jemma. You can’t take a crown like that off.”
“I’m not planning to.”
The rain hit the windows harder. He stared at me as though he was hoping I’d take it back. As though if he held the silence long enough, I’d hear the weight of what I was saying and reconsider.
I didn’t.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be smaller than what I am,” I said, and the words came out soft because they were true.
“Trying to be palatable. Trying to be the version of me the Order could live with. And every time I held something back, every time I bit my own teeth down on what I really am, they got to take a little more from me.” I pressed my fingers against my sternum.
“I’m done shrinking, Trace. I’m done apologizing for what’s in my blood.
They wanted Lucifer’s daughter? They’re about to get her. ”
Dominic hadn’t moved. His dark eyes held mine, unreadable, the rain pattering through the silence between us.
“It’s a one-way door,” he said finally. The lowness of it was somehow worse than if he’d shouted it.
“I know.”
“You’ll be theirs. Forever. The Realms, the legions, all of it. There is no abdicating an inheritance like that. No quiet retirement to a beach somewhere with a margarita.”
“I know.”
“And you’ve made peace with that.”
“I made peace with it the moment my mother told me Ares and Tessa and Gabriel were dead.”
He studied me for a long beat, and I held it, refusing to look away from those dark, taking-apart eyes that always saw too much.
“Well, then,” he said, the corner of his mouth pulling up just slightly. “If we’re going to start an apocalypse, we might as well do it on time.”
I felt my breath catch. “You’re with me?”
“Angel.” A slow, devastating smirk curved his lips. “Did you really think I was going to let you have all the fun?”
I let out a shaky laugh, half exhale, half disbelief. Then I turned to Trace.
He hadn’t moved from the window. He was still staring out at the rain, his jaw tight, his hands flexing at his sides like he didn’t know where to put them. Like every part of him was at war with every other part.
“Trace.”
He didn’t turn.
“I won’t do it without you,” I said, and I meant it.
He pulled in a long breath and let it out slowly. Then, finally, he turned. There were a hundred things in his eyes then. Grief and fear and that particular kind of love that didn’t know how to say no even when every survival instinct he had was screaming at him to.
He crossed the room without a word. When he reached me, he caught my face between his hands, and just held me there, his thumbs tracing the line of my jaw like he was committing me to memory.
“If we do this,” he said, his voice low and rough, “we do it together. All the way from here on out. No half-in bullshit. No coming back to me later and telling me to walk away for my own good or yours or whoever’s.”
“Okay,” I said breathlessly.
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He pressed a kiss to my mouth, then dropped his forehead to mine, releasing his breath in one long, surrendering exhale. “Then claim your fucking throne, baby.”
The words moved through me like a benediction and a battle cry stitched together.
There was no fear in them. No grief or hesitation or quiet plea for me to reconsider hidden underneath.
Just absolute, unshakeable faith. Faith that I could do this.
That he would still know me on the other side of it, and that whatever I would become, it would be someone that he was already prepared to love.
Everything inside me went very still. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t afraid of what I was stepping into. Because whoever I was about to be, wherever this life would take me, I knew I wasn’t going to be alone in it.
I stepped back from them and turned toward the center of the room. The rain hammered against the windows now, hard enough to drown out the rest of the house. The lights flickered once, briefly, as the sky outside split with another long roll of thunder.
For one suspended breath, I let myself stand there as the girl I had been.
The one who had spent every year of her life paying the price of admission into a destiny she had never wanted.
Apologizing for the blood in her veins. Translating herself into something the Order could live with.
Asking permission to exist in a world that had already decided what she was supposed to be.
She had loved fiercely and fought harder and held a line on her own darkness for so long it had nearly hollowed her out.
But she didn’t have to anymore.
The girl who walked out of the dome on the other side of this wasn’t going to ask for permission. Wasn’t going to apologize. Wasn’t going to keep paying admission to a world that had charged her everything and given her nothing back.
I let her go like a held breath. Then I closed my eyes and reached down inside myself.
All the way down to the part I’d spent years pretending wasn’t there.
The part that had always been waiting. The part that had risen to meet me in Sanguinarium and asked, quite plainly, why I’d kept it locked up for so long.
It was already moving toward me before I’d finished reaching and this time, I let it come.
“Per sanguinem patris mei,” I said, the incantation shaping itself in my mouth like it had always belonged there, “thronum vindico.”
The world stopped.