Chapter 52 #2
“I am asking you to be the better version of yourself.”
“There is no better version of me, William. That girl died a long fucking time ago.” My hand was at my side, my fingers curling into my palms. “You should know. You’re the one who killed her.”
He didn’t answer.
Angel. Dominic’s voice this time, low and behind me. He’s not bluffing. The sigils are real. I can feel them.
I knew they were real. I’d felt them the moment William’s eyes had cut to the wall. Felt them with the same clarity with which I felt the pull of the throne and the shape of my army outside and the talisman at the back of my neck.
He’d won. Or he thought he had.
I drew another breath. Longer this time. I let it fill me up.
“Tell me something,” I said, rolling my shoulders back like I was settling into a longer conversation than he’d been planning to have. “Where exactly were you planning to be when all of this went off?”
William’s brows furrowed. “I beg your pardon?”
“The sigils. The water. The forty thousand bodies.” I tilted my head. “Where were you going to be when they dropped?”
A pause.
“I do not understand the question.”
“Sure you do.” I took another step toward the desk.
“See, my whole life, I’ve watched you give speeches about sacrifice.
About the smaller part for the wellbeing of the whole.
About how you’ve made your peace with terrible things in service of the greater good.
And I watched you sit behind this desk and order them.
And every single time, William, every single time, the sacrifice was somebody else. ”
His jaw moved once.
“My father,” I said. “My mother. Tessa. Trace. Nikki. The baby. Forty thousand strangers in a town you’re supposed to protect.” I was at the edge of the desk now. “All of them, William. Every last one of them was the smaller part. Never you, though. Right?”
“This is not the time for—”
“So tell me.” I planted both hands flat on the desk and leaned in. “When that water hits those taps. When those forty thousand people start dying. Are you going to be in this chair? Or are you going to be at the back of the building running for the safehouse you undoubtably set up for yourself?”
His silence was the only answer I needed.
I straightened. “That’s what I thought.”
“Jemma—”
“You’re a coward, William.”
“I beg your pardon,” he barked, angry.
“You heard me. You’re a coward. You always have been.
” My voice didn’t rise. It didn’t need to.
“You dress it up in scripture and prophesy and call it duty and pretend you’ve been carrying some great weight, but at the end of the day, every single decision you’ve ever made has been about saving your own skin.
The smaller part for the greater good is just the line you tell yourself so you can sleep at night.
And the smaller part is always somebody else. ”
His face had gone very still.
“I should have expected nothing less,” I said softly. “The whole time I thought I was negotiating with a fanatic. I was actually negotiating with a gutless man who was just very good at finding ways to save his own ass.”
“You are out of your depth, little girl.”
“Am I?”
He sat forward slightly in his chair, the cassock bunching at his shoulders. “You will not call my bluff, Jemma. The cost is too high.”
“Oh, I’m not calling your bluff.”
His pale eyes flickered.
“I know you’re not bluffing,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I felt the sigils. I can practically smell the water. I know exactly what happens the moment your heart stops.” I leaned back in slightly. “Which is why your heart isn’t going to stop.”
The silence that fell over the office was different than before. Sharper. The silence of a man who had just heard a sentence he had not accounted for.
“What did you say?”
“Did I stutter?” I smiled.
The smug certainty I had been waiting to see crack finally cracked. Just a hairline split, just a fraction of a second, just long enough to see the calculation start running again behind his eyes.
My smile widened.
And then I called the throne.
It came up through me without effort, black smoke threading out of my fingertips and across the desk like a slow tide, the gold inside it veined and bright.
I felt it move through the room and find him.
I felt the moment it reached him, the way he stiffened in the chair, the way his fingers curled against the arms of it, the way the air around him simply… stopped.
His mouth was still open. His eyes were still mine. His chest had stopped moving, but the throne was holding it. Holding all of him. Every cell, every breath, every twitch of muscle, every electrical impulse running between his brain and his heart, paused in place exactly the way I wanted it.
His heart, of course, kept beating.
The sigils stayed dormant.
Trace cursed under his breath as Dominic let out a sound that was almost a laugh.
I walked around the desk slowly, my fingers trailing along its edge until I came to stop directly in front of his frozen body.
His eyes followed me. He couldn’t move anything else, but the eyes were still his, and I could see the moment he understood fully.
The moment he realized he had been outmatched in every way that counted, by the very thing he had spent his whole life trying to prevent from happening.
He’d accounted for me killing him. He’d accounted for me threatening him. He’d accounted for every move I was theoretically capable of making with the magic he was used to fighting against. He hadn’t accounted for me doing the unthinkable and claiming the throne.
I crouched in front of his chair so we were eye-level.
“Hi, William.”
His pupils flicked. The only movement he had left.
“I want you to listen to me very carefully,” I said, my voice low like I was whispering a dirty secret to him, “because I’m only going to explain this to you once.
Your sigils are still up. Your water is still safe.
Your forty thousand souls are going to wake up tomorrow morning, and the morning after that, and every morning after that, because your heart is going to keep beating for as long as I want it to.
Which is going to be a very, very long time. ”
His eyes searched mine, panicked gripping them.
“I’ve been thinking about what to do with you,” I went on.
“At first I thought I’d just dust you. Cinderdust. Send you to Sanguinarium, the same hellscape you tried to condemn me to.
Let you spend eternity wandering around in that bleeding sky with the rest of the bodies you put there.
Nobody finds you. Nobody comes for you. Nobody even remembers your name down there. ”
I tilted my head.
“But then I got to thinking about you. About the kind of man you are. And I realized that wouldn’t actually be a punishment for you, William.
You don’t have what it takes to make it there and you’d take the easy way out.
Especially if it means taking everyone in Hollow Hills out with you.
That’s what cowards do when they’re cornered.
They burn the building down and call it sacrifice. ”
His eyes were wet now.
“So I’m going to do something better.” I stood up slowly.
“I’m going to put you somewhere you won’t be able to end yourself,” I said, brushing an invisible piece of lint off the front of his cassock the way you might brush dust off something you were donating to charity.
“Somewhere your sigils can’t reach. Somewhere your Council can’t find you.
A pit so deep in Hades that no one will ever find you again.
Deeper than where any of the demons go. Where the light will never reach you.
And it’ll be just you, William. Alone. Forever.
And I’m going to make sure your heart keeps beating the entire time.
Because you’ve got forty thousand souls riding on it, and I can’t have anything happening to you. ”
His eyes were screaming.
“No one will hear you. No one will ever come for you. No one will even know you’re down there. You’ll have nothing but yourself and the dark and the very long, very slow understanding of exactly what you spent your life building.”
I leaned down and put my mouth close to his ear.
“Welcome to the smaller part, William,” I said sweetly and then straightened.
The throne hummed in answer the moment I asked.
Black smoke poured up around the chair, sealing him in, swirling around the still, frozen shape of him until I couldn’t see his face anymore.
I held the image of where I wanted him in my mind.
Held it long and clear and without mercy.
A tomb. Deep in Hell. Sealed and waiting and watched.
Surrounded by the very things he’d spent his life trying to keep buried, every one of them well-acquainted with what their Queen wanted done with him, and what was to be done if he ever stopped breathing.
The smoke pulled inward in a long, silent breath.
And then he was gone.
The chair was empty. The desk was empty. The decanter still sat on the silver tray, untouched. The room was very, very still before I finally turned around.
Trace was staring at me with an expression I couldn’t entirely read.
Awe and shock and something like reverence, all tangled together in the blue of his eyes.
Dominic was leaning back against the doorframe with his arms crossed, his mouth pulled up at one corner, looking at me like I’d just done a magic trick he wanted to learn.
“Don’t worry, he’s alive,” I told them, before either of them could ask. “And he’ll stay that way. The sigils will stay dormant for as long as his heart keeps beating. And his heart will keep beating for as long as I let it.”
Trace’s brow furrowed. “Where did you send him?”
“Where else? A tomb in Hell.”
Dominic’s mouth twitched. “Decorative.”