Chapter 53 #2
He wasn’t going to learn what he was from a stranger in a black cassock.
He wasn’t going to lie awake at night counting the people who wanted him dead.
He wasn’t going to spend his childhood looking over his shoulder, waiting for the next attempt on his life.
Which was why I was building him a school.
Not in Hollow Hills. Somewhere the Order’s old maps would never think to look.
A place for the children who came into the world the way Ares did.
With too much blood in their veins and not enough room in any one Realm to hold it.
A place that taught them what they were before the world had the chance to teach them what they were supposed to be afraid of.
The Roderick sisters were helping me with the wards. Anita had promised the foundation would be laid on bones older than the Order itself, woven from magic that pre-dated anyone who might one day come looking. I had already chosen the land. I had already started drawing the floorplans.
It was going to take years, but someday soon when Ares was old enough, he would walk through its doors and he would never have to look over his shoulder again.
That was my promise to him.
That was the inheritance I was choosing.
It had been a long road getting here. Longer than I had any business surviving. There were stretches I didn’t think I’d come out the other side of, and stretches I almost didn’t want to.
But I did. I made it.
I dropped my pen onto the floorplan and pressed my fingers against my eyes.
Across the study, Dominic was sprawled in the leather armchair with a glass of something dark balanced on the arm and an old leather-bound book open in his lap.
He hadn’t turned a page in twenty minutes.
He was watching me the way he always did when he thought I wasn’t paying attention.
Like I was the most interesting thing in any room, in any Realm, on any Timeline.
Like he still couldn’t quite believe I was real, and would gladly spend the rest of forever proving it to himself, one slow look at a time.
I caught his eye across the study.
“Don’t let me distract you, my Queen. I’m only here to admire.” He winked.
My heart, traitor that it was, flipped over straight through.
I shook my head at him and tried to go back to my floorplans, but I was already smiling. The study door creaked open a moment later and Trace walked in with Ares in his arms.
The second Ares saw me, his face split into a grin so big it scrunched his whole nose, and he shrieked the high, delighted shriek of a child who had been separated from his favorite person for an unsurvivable forty-five minutes.
His chubby little arms shot out toward me and his whole body strained forward in Trace’s grip, halfway to launching himself across the room.
“Easy, buddy, easy,” laughed Trace, adjusting his grip on him as he crossed to the desk. “She’s right here. She’s not going anywhere.”
“Come here, you,” I said, holding my arms out as Ares all but dove into them, his curls catching on my chin and his small, hot hand patting my cheek twice in greeting like I’d been gone for years.
Trace dropped a deep, slow kiss on my mouth that lingered just long enough to make my breath catch, his hand cupping the back of my neck.
Then he straightened, ruffled Ares’s hair on his way past, and crossed to where Dominic was sitting.
Without breaking stride, he reached down and knocked Dominic’s ankle off his knee with the side of his foot, then dropped into the chair opposite him and stretched out his legs like he’d been planning the move all evening.
Dominic didn’t even look up from his book. “Mature.”
“You love it.”
“I tolerate it.”
I pressed a kiss to the top of Ares’s head and breathed him in. He smelled like baby shampoo and graham crackers and the strange, specific sweetness of a child who had been outside in the sun.
His hand shot toward my floorplan.
“Oh, no you don’t.” I gently caught his wrist and pulled it back, kissing his hand before sliding the paper out of grabbing range. “Not these, my love. These are special.”
“Buh,” said Ares, with great offense.
“I know. I know.” I bounced him on my hip and his frown collapsed back into a grin almost immediately. “But these are a present. A really, really big present. For you.”
He didn’t understand a word of it, of course.
He just laughed, the loud open-mouthed laugh of a one-year-old who had decided that whatever was happening was good, and grabbed a fistful of my hair instead, tugging on it with the absolute confidence of someone who knew, all the way down to his soul, that he was loved.
I looked at the small, perfect, ferocious boy in my arms, and at Trace and Dominic across the room bickering in low voices about something neither of them really cared about, and at the floorplans of the school I was building so my brother would never have to be afraid of what he was.
And I thought about the girl who had landed in Hollow Hills in the back of a town car with a duffel bag and no idea what was coming for her.
I thought about everything she’d been through to get here.
Every loss. Every surrender. Every moment she’d been certain the world was about to end and somehow gotten up the next morning anyway.
I thought about the version of her who had sat on a bathroom floor, pulled apart by grief, and believed, for one terrible afternoon, that there was nothing left worth saving.
I wished I could reach back through time and tell her.
Don’t give up. Just hold on a little longer.
I know it doesn’t feel like the sun is coming.
But it is. You’re going to get your happily ever after, and even if it’s not the version you were dreaming about, it’s so much better than the one you begged for in the dark.
It’s something stranger and bigger and more yours than anything you would have known how to ask for.
You’re going to lose things. There’s no soft way to say it.
Some of them you’re going to grieve for the rest of your life.
But the ones who are meant to stay will stay.
The ones who are meant to come back will come back.
And what you build out of the wreckage will be worth every brick you carried to get here.
So hold on.
You make it home.
Ares pressed his forehead against mine and made a contented sound, the sound a child makes when he has decided he is exactly where he wants to be.
I closed my eyes and let it all wash over me. The warmth of him. The sound of Trace and Dominic still bickering across the study. The whole impossible weight of being here, being still, being safe.
I had been Lucifer’s daughter, and Thomas Blackburn’s daughter, and the girl who had jumped, and the girl who had crawled back out of Sanguinarium, and the Queen of Hades who had buried a man so deep no one would ever find him.
But here, in this room, with this child in my arms and these men in my heart, I was something simpler than all of it.
I was home.
And I was, finally, at peace.
The End.