Page 117 of Illusory

“Separatelyat the same time,” clarified Dominic, as if that made this any better or clearer or different. “We’re not asking for anything more than what we hadbefore.”

“What we had before was a mess and you were both miserable,” I reminded him because apparently, I was the only one who remembered the amount of blood they’d shed last week alone.

“We’re more miserable now,” argued Trace, the pain etched into his face like a permanent scar. “It was a mess because we wouldn’t stop fighting each other. Because we hated each other and wanted to win. But it’s different now.”

“How could it be different?” I said, shaking my head at the impossibility of it. “You hate each other.”

“He hated me because I’m your soulmate and he wasn’t.And I hated him because hewasn’tyour soulmate and you loved him anyway. But all that shit did was force you to choose when you weren’t ready, and we both lost you because of it,” he explained, his blue eyes glimmering as if to show me how sincere he was. As if to prove to me just how low he had sunken into the depths of despair without me. “But I can’t lose you, Jemma. Iwon’t.”

But I already knew he’d only sink lower if I agreed to this. These were the words of a desperate man, a man gripping on for dear life, and they would surely come back to haunt him in the end. He just couldn’t see that right now. He couldn’t see any of it. But I sure as hell did.

“Listen to me, Trace. I know it hurts right now; believe meI know. But it will get better in time. It will. It won’t hurt as much and eventually you’ll get over me and move on. But this…thissituation—going backwards like this—thatwon’tget better. We’d only be prolonging the inevitable and eventually, we’d just end up right back here anyway. We’d self-destruct, all three of us, and that’s if the guilt doesn’t eat me alive first.”

“No guilt, angel. No strings. No expectations,” said Dominic, his tone begging me to give it a chance. “We go into this knowing where we stand, and we leave everything open and undefined.”

The hollow, broken pieces of my heart clanked around in my chest, trying to piece themselves together.

“And what? You’re just going to happilyshareme between the two of you? Rotate evenings and weekends?” I asked aghast, mostly at myself because for the briefest of seconds, I almost let myself consider it.

“We’ve been sharing you since the day we met you,” reminded Dominic, his lip twitching as though he wanted to smile at that, though Trace didn’t seem quite as pleased with the comment as he was.

“That’s not…that’sdifferent.” While technically true, it had never been intentional. Only a consequence of my inability to choose after months of death and possession and amnesia and other things that constantly blurred the line between all of us. But mostly because of the undeniable pull I’d always felt toward the both of them since the very moment I’d laid eyes on them. But it was different now. Iknewbetter now.

I mean…didn’t I?

“All we’re asking is that you don’t shut us out. That’s it,” said Trace, drawing my attention back to him as he ducked down to level his eyes with mine. “We just want it to go back to the way it was, and we can figure out the rest later.”

“Later when, Trace? When it’s time to decide who’s going to take me to prom? Or later like when we decide who’s sleeping in my bed tonight?”

Dominic swallowed roughly as Trace crossed his arms.

“Or maybe we should just wait untilwaylater,” I went on tartly, “like when it’s time to buy a house and we need to figure out if we’re going with a one bedroom or three.”

Absolute. Dead. Silence.

Neither one said anything as I effectively shattered whatever bubble they had deluded themselves into.

“Exactly.” I took a small step back, my gaze meeting each of theirs pointedly. “This isn’t what you want. Neither of youwantthis. You’re settling forscrapsbecause it’s still fresh and it hurts like hell, and right now scraps seem a lot better than nothing at all. But I’ll be damned if I ever let either of you get anything less than the world you fucking deserve,” I said and then stepped between the two of them to leave.

And this time, they let me go.

38. CRACKS IN THE FORTRESS

It occurred to me as I made my way back up the stairs, away from Trace and Dominic and the lunacy that happened in the kitchen, that I was probably going to need to come up with a different game plan. A better game plan. Because, clearly, freezing them out as I’d been doing was only driving them to the brink of insanity.

Nothing else could explain what had just happened.

I’d simply ended things too quickly; too drastically and they just couldn’t handle it. They’d never be able to see the light if they were too busy holding on to me for dear life. I needed to ease them into it. Transition them into seeing less and less of me until it finally (hopefully) stopped hurting so much.

Except that I had no idea how I was going to do that when I could barely control myself in their company as it was, let alone when they wereactivelypursuing me.

Needing a mental reprieve from all things Trace and Dominic, I made a beeline for the study and then spent the next couple of hours combing through Elspeth’s grimoire, looking for something—anything—that could help me gain an edge over the long list of people who wanted to see me dead.

Apart from needing to keep myself busy and focused on the dark storm that was barreling toward me (andnoton Trace and Dominic), I also genuinely wanted to know more about the Nephilim race and what exactly that would mean for my life moving forward.

While Jaqueline had pretty much done what she did best and abandoned me in my time of need, she’d at least had thedecency to leave behind the translations she’d been working on. Most had been focused on finding out how to control my wings, which luckily for me, hadn’t made another appearance since Nikki’s house.

But that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t, and knowing my luck, probably at the most inopportune moment. So, with the help of the internet and a translation app on my phone, I quickly figured out which words I needed to be looking for and got to work.Ala,alas, andaliswere the main ones, but there were several other variations of ‘wings’ I had to keep an eye out for as well. After that, it was just a matter of having the patience to scan through the hundreds of pages of handwritten text.

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