Chapter 51
The rain didn’t stop on the drive over to Temple.
If anything it got worse, sheeting down across the windshield in slow, christening waves, turning the world outside the SUV into something blurred and indistinct.
The wipers worked in steady arcs and never quite caught up.
Trace drove in silence with one hand on the wheel and the other resting loosely against his thigh, his jaw set and his eyes on the road.
Dominic sat in the front passenger seat with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, looking like he had personally invited the storm and was looking forward to its arrival.
I sat in the middle of the back seat. Far enough from either window that nothing could reach me without going through metal first, my hand curled around the hilt of the Sword of Angelus inside my jacket. Just to be safe.
The rain was coming down hard, but somehow, it almost felt like a baptism.
That was the word my mind kept coming back to, even though I’d really never been a religious girl.
There was something about the way the water came down, indifferent and absolute, washing the world clean ahead of us.
Like the storm itself had decided to come along for the ride.
Like the rain knew what the night was about to require and had decided to consecrate the asphalt under our wheels.
It felt full circle in a way I couldn’t quite put into words.
The very first time I’d ever driven into Temple it had been in the rain.
The day my uncle had taken me there, back when I still believed the Order was the closest thing I would find to safety.
Maybe even a family. Back before I knew that the building we were driving toward had been built on the bones of every truth they’d ever buried about my father, my blood, and my future.
Now I was driving back to it as the very thing they had spent my entire life trying to make sure I never became.
I pressed my fingertips against the glass of the window and watched the water sluice down the other side of it.
“A penny for your thoughts?” asked Dominic, turning his head just enough to glance back at me from the front passenger seat.
I smiled, remembering the first time he said that to me. God, it felt like a lifetime ago now. “I’m just thinking.”
“About?” He quirked his brow.
“About the first time I drove to Temple with Uncle Karl and how terrified I was.”
“And now?”
I looked up and held his gaze. “And now I’m terrified for them.”
Trace’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror and caught mine, just for a beat, before returning to the road.
He didn’t say anything. Then again, he didn’t need to.
The bond between us was humming steadily, and through it I could feel everything he was feeling.
The fear. The immovable certainty. The love that had twisted itself so completely through the rest of it that the three were no longer separable.
‘Fret not, love’, said Dominic into my mind, his voice as smooth as silk against the inside of my skull. ‘Whatever waits for us in there, we’ll burn it to the ground together and then make the ruins blush.’
Trace shot Dominic a look, his brow pulling in tightly. “Could you not?”
I blinked at the back of his head, then turned to Dominic, who hadn’t moved an inch from his comfortable sprawl in the passenger seat.
“Not what?” asked Dominic, the picture of innocence.
“The scratchy mind thing. While I’m driving.” Trace exhaled hard through his nose. “It’s distracting.”
“Apologies, Romeo. I’ll try to keep my private conversations with our Queen to mortal hours of the day from now on.”
“Yeah, real big of you.”
I bit down on a smile and leaned forward between the two front seats, bracing my forearms on the center console so I could keep both of them in my sightline. “You’re going to have to give him a minute,” I said to Dominic. “He’s still adjusting.”
“Adjusting,” repeated Dominic, like the word amused him. He turned his head just enough to look at me where I’d propped myself between them. “To what, precisely?”
“To you in his head. To me in his head. To the three of us all being able to hear each other now.”
The corner of his mouth pulled up a fraction. “Well. He may have to adjust quickly. I don’t imagine I’ll be giving up the privilege any time soon.”
“Heard that,” said Trace flatly, eyes still on the road.
“Yes,” said Dominic without looking away from me. “That was rather the point seeing as I said that part out loud.”
Trace’s lips twitched but he didn’t take his eyes off the windshield. Dominic exhaled a breath that was almost a laugh and let his head tip lazily back against the headrest.
I stayed where I was, leaned forward between the two of them, content for the moment to just be in the small dark warmth of the SUV with the storm pressing against the glass and my men ahead of me on either side.
My whole life, I’d been the loneliest person in every room I walked into.
I didn’t feel that way anymore. I hadn’t felt that way in a long time, but tonight, with what was waiting for us at the end of this drive, the absence of it sat sharper than usual.
Whatever was about to happen at Temple, I wasn’t walking into it alone.
I never would again. I knew that with the whole of my heart.
I let myself sit with that for another long moment before I finally pushed back from the console and sank back into my seat again.
We turned onto the long drive that led up to Temple, and I felt the breath go out of me.
The building rose out of the storm in front of us, dark and stone and exactly as I remembered it, every window a yellow rectangle against the gray. But it was what surrounded it that caught my breath.
They were everywhere.
The demons stood in loose, silent rows along every approach.
Three deep at the main entrance. Lining the gravel paths.
Pacing the perimeter in slow, unhurried sweeps.
The hellhounds prowled the gardens, moving in and out of the shadows between the hedges like the storm had birthed them.
Dark Casters stood in clusters of four and five along the property line, their hoods drawn against the rain, every one of them turning to face the SUV as we passed.
It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.
And every last one of them was mine.
“Christ,” muttered Trace, his eyes moving across the windshield slowly, taking in the full scope of it. “You weren’t kidding.”
“Did you think I was?”
“No. I just didn’t expect it to look like…” His jaw worked once. “…that.”
“Like the end of the world?”
“Or the beginning of a completely new one,” he said as he pulled the SUV to a stop at the front of the building and killed the engine. The rain hammered down on the roof as the three of us stared forward through the glass for a long beat, none of us moving.
“Last chance, angel,” said Dominic, twisting in the passenger seat so he could look back at me directly. “We can still turn this car around.”
“And do what exactly?”
“Run. Go into hiding. We could easily buy ourselves a few months and watch the Order tear itself apart trying to figure out how to contain you.”
I shook my head. “They’d come for us eventually.”
“They certainly would try.”
“Yup.” I blew out a tired breath. “And while they were trying, every other person I love would be in their crosshairs. We’d never be safe. Not until this is over.”
He was quiet for a beat. Then, “Very well, angel. Just checking.”
I smiled despite myself and shifted my attention to the back of Trace’s head. “What about you?” I asked.
He glanced at me in the rearview, blue eyes meeting mine in the small rectangle of glass. “Are you ready for this?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
The corner of his mouth lifted, just barely.
“And you?” I asked.
“Same.”
I held his gaze in the mirror a beat longer, searching for the brittle edge that usually showed up when he was about to walk into something he didn’t want me anywhere near, but it wasn’t there.
What was there instead was something steadier.
The look of a man who had decided, somewhere between Sanguinarium and now, that there was no version of this where he wasn’t standing exactly where I was standing.
That made two of us.
Three of us, if I counted Dominic. Which I always did.
I nodded, drew in a long breath and then pushed my door open to climb out of the SUV.
The rain hit me the moment my boots touched the gravel, ice-cold and merciless, and I welcomed it.
It washed down my face and into my hair and through my jacket, and I let it.
The demons at the front door parted to either side as we approached, lowering their heads in that same quiet, respectful gesture.
Two hellhounds peeled away from the shadows and fell into step at our flanks, their massive paws silent on the wet stone.
I stopped at the foot of the steps and turned to face them.
“Walk with me to the door,” I said, my voice low but carrying through the rain, “and then hold the line. No one goes in. No one comes out. Not until I say.”
Every head in the courtyard tipped down once.
Trace fell into step on my left. Dominic on my right. We climbed the stairs together and I paused at the top, my hand on the heavy door, looking out across the army that had come to stand watch at my command.
I knew what came next.
I knew the demons couldn’t follow me inside.
The wards on Temple were ancient, layered, woven with the kind of Anakim magic that pre-dated the Council itself.
Hadean creatures couldn’t cross that threshold, not while the wards still held.
Not even at my command. The throne could call them, place them, command them.
But it could not break what the Order had spent a thousand years building.
Inside the building, it was just going to be me. And the two men I loved.
I turned to look at them one last time.
Some traitorous part of me wanted to ask them to stay out here. To wait for me on the steps where I could come back to them in one piece. The same part of me that had tried to send Trace home a thousand times in a thousand different ways across every fight we’d ever walked into together.
I shut it up.
I’d made him a promise, and I’d meant every word of it.
Trace's blue eyes searched mine, and I knew by the way they held me without flinching that he could feel me wrestling with it through the bond. There were no words for it. None we needed.
Dominic stepped in close, his finger tipping my chin up so I had to meet his dark, taking-apart gaze. “Whatever you’re thinking, angel, the answer is no.”
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
“I know.” The corner of his mouth pulled up. “I’m proud of you.”
A laugh almost broke loose at the back of my throat. I bit it back.
“All or nothing,” he murmured, his thumb tracing once across my jaw before his hand fell away. “The way it’s always been.”
“All or nothing,” I echoed.
Trace’s hand came up to the back of my neck, and he leaned in and pressed his forehead to mine. “Whatever happens in there, we go in together. We come out together. Or we don’t come out at all.”
“Together,” echoed Dominic, his hand finding the small of my back.
I closed my eyes for one breath. Just one. Letting myself feel them on either side of me. The two halves of my heart, here, holding the line with me.
Then I opened my eyes and pushed the door open.