Page 21 of Dominion

With those words, she passed right next to me, heading out of the room.

“What if I’m not strong enough for revenge?” I asked, turning toward her. “What if I don’t have the skills needed?”

She immediately stopped at the threshold, turning to look at me. “Trust me, when the time comes, the strength you didn’t know you possessed will come to help you. Revenge isn’t about a specific skill set that I have now or that Ophelia has. Revenge is what comes from your heart. You don’t have to be a professional assassin to know how to hold a knife or how to push that tip straight through their throat because they took everything from you.”

With every word that rolled off of her tongue, every single syllable, the hatred she still carried became so much more evident, living on the surface of her skin, suffocating the light trying to break through into her life, and I knew that she wasn’t talking about the revenge I needed.

She was talking about the one she executed.

My forehead was gluedto the freezing cold window of the SUV as the trees passed by us, telling me we were closer to Winworth than before. I saw the table indicating the familiar road leading into Winworth, but we passed it almost half an hour ago, heading straight into the mountains surrounding my hometown. I had no idea where the Red Manor was located, but Cillian and Chiara did and that was all that mattered.

Snow lingered on the leaves and covered the ground, becoming thicker and thicker the further up we went. I tried not to think about all the times we came to this side to hike, to just walk and be kids. How was it possible that I never thought more about the monstrosities hiding behind the corners of our little town? It only showed how ignorant we were to the things happening around us until the same things started happening to us.

All these men and women holding control over this entire area made me sick, but there was nothing I could do to change it now. I didn’t want to think about the Order and what became of it after the fire I caused. I didn’t even know who the exact members of it were. Yesterday, I dared to have a look atWinworth Daily, the newspaper that covered everything in town, and saw the headlines for the burned down building.

But the root of the problem in Winworth wasn’t simply the Order. It was Judah Blackwood and his little minions who did all his bidding. It was all those families that closed their eyes so they couldn’t see the things happening around them. Maybe it wasn’t on me to change it all, but someone had to start. Someone had to take things into their own hands.

If it wasn’t me, who would?

Kane and Rowan weren’t in contact with me right now, and I dreaded trying to call them, to figure out where we stood. Kane’s parents were down in those catacombs, and whether they were horrible or not, they were still his parents.

And I killed them.

The car swerved left onto a gravel road I hadn’t noticed before, but why would I? We always stayed on the main track, heading up into the mountains where the line of caves was located. I often ignored the obvious signs of sinister dealings in this forest, oblivious to the dangers lurking around. I guess that it was my way of running away from the one monster that waited for me at home.

The chatter in the car was overpowered by the sound of the music, and my eyes immediately teared up when I realized which song it was.

Lord Huron sang about “The Night We Met”, bringing back the first time I saw Ash. The first time he pressed his lips to mine. The hatred and the love I felt in the beginning. The fear that I would lose him because Judah knew about him.

It brought back the first time I had accepted that Dylan meant something more to me.

The tears I’d been keeping at bay collected in my eyes, threatening to spill over my cheeks, but I wouldn’t let them. My teeth bit down into my lower lip, holding in the sob lodged in my throat. As I closed my eyes, pressing my forehead to the icy window, I tried to push it all away, locking it in the small chest, hidden behind my ribs, where everything I ever loved stayed safe and no one could ever take it from me.

The car suddenly stopped, the sound of the tires screeching over the gravel piercing through my mind, and the music stopped momentarily.

“What’s going on?” I asked, looking at the back of Cillian’s head who was sitting right in front of me in the passenger’s seat. My back ached from the position I was in for almost five hours with only one break. My muscles ached. My neck felt as if Godzilla was sitting there, clinging to me. I knew when we started this journey that I wouldn’t be able to get out for quite some time.

“There’s a fallen tree on the road up ahead,” Cillian said. “Chiara and her team are removing it.”

I leaned forward between the seats, trying not to touch the sleeping Francisco who was sitting on my left. He wasn’t joking when he said that he could sleep through anything.

“It shouldn’t take long,” our driver, Claudio, another one of Chiara’s men, spoke, keeping a strong grip on the steering wheel. I knew it was insane, and maybe a little selfish, but I felt safer knowing all these people were here to help us. I had no idea what the price would be for this luxury, but I didn’t care.

If I had to sell my soul to the Devil to save Ash and Dylan, I would.

I could hear shouting and laughter from outside. Squinting, I saw Chiara rushing back inside her car. We were the second ones in line, with four more SUVs trailing behind us.

Shortly after I dressed in the clothes Chiara had given me, we all gathered in the living room where Zoe practically forced food down our throats, ignored a grumbling Indigo, and kept looking at me as if I’d lost my mind for wanting to go.

I understood the worry. I would be worried too. But I had to go.

I didn’t even try getting half of the phrases Chiara used as she issued the orders, but I did know that there were four teams that would go inside—two from the front, one from the back, and one through the old sewage tunnel opening not too far away from the manor.

That’s all I needed to know, to be very honest. There was no use in me knowing anything else when I was going to be inside the car, far away from any real danger. Cillian made sure to point that out at least ten times during that meeting. If I rolled my eyes one more time, I worried they would end up somewhere in Turkey.

The trunks were filled with guns I couldn’t even name. The moment I saw something that looked like a grenade thrower, I turned around and walked toward the rear side door and sat inside. Silence followed us all the way from the safe house, accompanied only by the soft sounds of music Cillian played from time to time, but neither one of us spoke. Chiara wanted to surprise them at dusk, when visibility at the mountain was at its lowest. If we didn’t hurry up, we would miss that window. I knew this area like the back of my hand, and seeing the darkening of the clouds, slightly hidden by the fog falling down on the mountain, made my nerves skyrocket.

“We need to hurry,” I mumbled, more to myself than to them, but in the close confines of the car they could hear me.

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