Chapter 52 #3
“The legion knows what to do with him.” I picked up one of the crystal tumblers from the silver tray and turned it slowly between my fingers, watching the firelight move across the cut glass.
“They’ll keep him alive. They’ll make sure of it.
And if anyone ever stumbles onto him down there and gets clever ideas about ending him, well.
” I set the tumbler back down with a soft clink.
“They already know exactly what I want done about that too.”
I drew in a breath and looked once more at the empty chair behind William’s desk.
At the decanter and the three untouched tumblers and the cassock-shaped impression on the leather where forty years of sermons had left their dent.
At the office of a man whose name no one would ever say above a whisper again, and whose heart, at this very moment, was beating against its will somewhere no map would ever find.
I lowered myself into the chair across from his desk. The same one he’d gestured me toward when I’d walked in. The one I’d refused. I let myself feel every inch of the leather under me now, let myself feel the room without him in it, let myself feel the absoluteness of what I’d just done.
Trace took the chair beside mine, his thumb grazing the line of my jaw. “You okay?”
I nodded, even though I wasn’t entirely sure that was true.
Dominic’s dark eyes followed the movement from across the room. “She’s settling into it,” he said, the dry note in his voice doing a poor job of disguising what was underneath it. “Give her a moment, Romeo. She’s only just figuring out what it feels like to have a man’s pulse on a leash.”
Trace shot him a look that suggested he was approximately one comment away from being introduced to the doorframe at speed, but the corner of my mouth pulled up despite myself, and that was enough to break some of the heaviness in the room.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a part of me that wanted to feel triumphant.
The vengeful, devil-blooded part that had been sharpening itself against the inside of my skin for years, finally given its hour.
The part of me that craved the darkness, that had crawled out of Sanguinarium with my whole world buried on the other side of the seam, that had wanted nothing in this life more than to see William Thompson pay for every breath he had stolen from the people I loved.
That part of me was satisfied.
But there was another part underneath it. The part of me my dad had raised. The Slayer’s daughter. The girl who had spent her whole life trying to be good in a way the world hadn’t made very much room for. And that part of me knew what the rest of me wasn’t ready to admit just yet.
That this was going to cost me.
Maybe not tonight. Tonight, I’d sleep like the dead between the two of them and not feel a thing.
But somewhere in the months and years stretching ahead of me, on some quiet, ordinary night when I had nothing left to do but lie in the dark with my own thoughts, I was going to remember the sound of the chair going still.
The pupils flicking. The wetness in his eyes.
The form of a man so completely robbed of everything that even his fear had nowhere left to go.
And I was going to have to carry it. All of it.
Every last inch of what I had done in this room.
That was the price of admission to the throne I had claimed. I had known it when I claimed it. I’d known it walking through the front doors of Temple tonight. I knew it now.
I had become something my father would have grieved.
But I had also become something he would have been proud of.
Because I hadn’t done this for vengeance.
Not really. Not at the bottom of it. I had done it for Ares.
For Tessa. For every name on the long, awful list of people the Order had taken from me, and for every name on the longer list still out there, waiting to be taken.
I had done it so that nobody else would have to grow up the way I did.
Looking over their shoulder. Apologizing for what their blood was.
Asking permission to exist from people who had already decided they shouldn’t.
I had done it for peace.
Not the kind William and his Council had been peddling for centuries.
Not William’s manufactured kind that required someone to be beneath someone else, the kind that called itself peace because the screaming was happening somewhere else entirely.
I wanted the real thing. The kind that lived between equals.
The kind that made room for the Nephilim and the Hadeans and everyone in between, because the Order’s old narrative—that one side was the light and the other side was the dark and the dark had to be eradicated for the light to live—wasn’t a truth I had ever once seen confirmed in real life.
That line had never been where any of them said it was.
I knew, sitting there in the aftermath, that this wasn’t over.
That William had been one man, and the Order had been built on centuries of men exactly like him, and somewhere out there, the rest of his Council was already being told what had happened in this office tonight.
They would come for me eventually. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next week, but they would come, because that was what they did.
The difference was, this time, I would be ready for them.
This time, I had an army of my own.
This time, I was the thing they were going to have to negotiate with.
And I was going to fight, tooth and nail and blood and bone, for the kind of peace that didn’t require my baby brother to grow up afraid of his own shadows.
The kind that didn’t demand the destruction of one side for the other to feel safe.
I would bargain for it, threaten for it, kill for it if it ever came to that, but I was going to make them sit down at a table they had spent a thousand years refusing to share.
It was going to be a long road. Maybe my whole life. Maybe Ares’s whole life after mine.
But I had time.
I had a throne, and an army, and the two men currently watching over me without saying a word and family and friends who loved me fully. That was more than I had ever thought I would get, and it was more than enough.
I drew in a breath, let it out, and rose from the chair.
Trace’s hand slid down to mine and squeezed once before letting go as Dominic pushed off the doorframe but didn’t move toward the corridor yet. I already knew without looking that they were both watching me, waiting to see what I was going to do next.
I crossed back around to William’s side of the desk.
The phone sat where he’d left it, neat and ordinary and exactly where it had always been.
A black landline with a row of programmed speed dials running down the side of the receiver.
I scanned them once, my eyes landing on the one labeled simply with a single letter in his careful, fastidious hand.
The man William had answered to. The man whose name only ever appeared in whispers, even within the Council itself.
The man who had sat at the top of the Order long before William ever rose to Senior Magister, and who would, until tonight, have considered himself the last word on what happened to me.
G.M.
Grand Magisterium.
“One down,” I said as I picked up the receiver and pressed the key. “However many want to try me left to go.”