Page 105 of Inevitable Endings
My chair scrapes back.
‘‘Isabella,’’ Ada hisses, reaching for me.
But it’s too late.
I step into the open, walking with purpose across the marble floor. I see the shock ripple across the guards’ faces as I enter.Their hands go for their weapons, quick, trained, unhesitating.
But Dominik lifts his hand.
Everything stills.
The silence after Dominik lifts his hand is unnatural. Heavy. Like the very air in the room recognizes the shift in gravity around him and obeys without question. The guards freeze mid-motion, hands hovering over weapons, jaws clenched. Their eyes flick to him, then to me, uncertain, confused, but they don’t move.
I stop just a few feet in front of them, breathing hard, not from exertion but from the weight of this moment. My pulse drums against the inside of my skull. The blood in my body feels too loud. Too fast. My coat feels too tight, my skin too thin. I’m painfully aware of how small I must look standing here, pale, trembling, out of place in a room like this, a cathedral of violence and power.
And then I meet his eyes.
Dominik stares at me like I’m not real. Like I’ve clawed my way out of a memory he buried with his own hands. It’s not a reunion. It’s not relief. It’s something deeper, rawer. Recognition wrapped in cold fire.
I feel it before I know it’s coming; a single tear slips down my cheek, carving a hot path down skin that has seen too little sun, too little rest. The tear betrays nothing of weakness. It’s not even sadness, not entirely. It’s the kind of tear that comes when your body is too full of things you don’t have words for.
Still, I hold his gaze. One heartbeat. Two. We don’t speak. We don’t need to.
And then he moves.
A flick of his fingers, barely a gesture, but it carries the weight of command. The guards around him tense, like dogs waiting for a second order, but the look in his eyes tells them this is final. They don’t question him.
He is thepakhannow.
Their eyes linger on me, suspicion coiled in every bone, before they slowly step back, one by one, filing out of the room without a sound. They pass close, too close, and I feel the burn of their glances against my skin like friction. Like judgment.
The door doesn’t close fully behind them before I see two shadows rush into view.
Ada appears first, half a second before Sawyer, both of them with fire in their eyes and tension in their stances. Ada’s hand is inside her coat, ready to draw. Sawyer’s entire posture radiates barely-controlled violence. His eyes flick to Dominik immediately, and then to me, like he’s already calculating the risk, the damage, the odds.
Dominik turns to them slowly, his body still, but his presence thick enough to smother the air.
His stare lands on Ada first. Then Sawyer.
No words.
No questions.
Just silence stretched razor-thin.
I swallow hard, forcing my voice to work. It comes out softer than I mean it to—raspy, raw. “They’re with me,” I say, my voice trembling at the edges. “They’re my friends.”
Dominik doesn’t look away from them. Not yet. His eyes linger a beat longer, long enough for the weight of him to settle over the room again. And then, finally, he shifts his gaze back to me.
He nods.
Once. Simple. Final.
Like a door creaking open in the dark.
Chapter 47
Beneath the Bodies,
