Page 52 of Illusory

“Please tell me you’re joking,” she said without a lick of amusement on her face. “This has to be a joke because I know there’s no way you did somethingthatstupid.”

“Oh, you have no idea about the levels of stupidity I could reach when I put my mind to it.”

“Christ, Jemma!”

“Did she do this to you?” asked Caleb, his face all scrunched up with shock and disbelief, like he expected me to be able to take her. I appreciated the sentiment.

“No.” I shook my head. “She wasn’t even there.”

The sound of the front door crashing open interrupted us before I could say anything more. It was just as well. I really didn’t want to have to recount the story all over again once the others made it back.

Feeling the sense of shame creep in again, I dropped my head and stared at the floor as the stampede of footsteps rushed down the hallway and then into the kitchen before coming to an abrupt stop.

No doubt they were all gawking at me.

“Fucking hell,” said Ben, his voice barely above a hiss. “What the hell happened to you, Jem?”

Swallowing against the ache in my throat, I lifted my eyes. Gabriel, Jackie and Ben stood in a messy line with horrified expressions on their faces. I already knew I looked bad, I’d checked my face in the car mirror before coming inside thehouse, but I imagined the bruising and swelling was getting exponentially worse with every passing second.

I couldn’t help but notice that Dominic wasn’t there. He’d probably gone back to whatever he had been doing when he found out that I was back home. She really shouldn’t have called him.

“She was just about to tell us exactly what in God’s name possessed her to go toNikki’shouse of all places, and why her face looks like she went twelve rounds with a bear,” announced Tessa, her sharp grey eyes fixed on me expectantly.

Gabriel shoved forward and rushed to my side, putting his hand on my shoulder and the small of my back and then guiding me to the table. “Here, sit down,” he instructed as he pulled out a chair for me. “Someone get me a first aid kit.”

“It’s fine,” I said, waving him off as I shakily lowered myself into the chair. I had no interest in ointment and bandages. I needed the good stuff. The vampire stuff.

Jackie blurred out of the room anyway and quickly returned with a first aid kit in her hands. She dropped it on the table in front of me and then stepped back, not saying or doing anything else. Still gunning for that Mother Of The Year award.

“I don’t understand, Jem,” said Ben as he ambled closer to me. Apparently, he and Gabriel were the only ones not afraid of getting too close to me. “Why would you go see Nikki of all people?”

How the hell was I going to explain this one?

“I just…Ineededto warn her about the Roderick sisters. About what Morgansaw,” I finally admitted, deciding to lay down my arms and face the fallout. “I know it might not make sense to any of you, but from the second Morgan told me about her vision, about what the Roderick sisters wereplanning to do, I’ve had this uncontrollable urge to warn Nikki about what was coming. I couldn’t shake it no matter what I did.”

“So, instead of mentioning this to us, you decide to run off by yourself and go toe-to-toe with the Devil’s concubine instead?” asked Tessa, like she couldn’t believe I’d do something so reckless. But like, did she just meet me?

“It wasn’t like that,” I said and then winced as Gabriel poured antiseptic into one of the wounds on my shoulder. “I wasn’t planning on facing off with her. This was about the baby—about warning her about what Morgan saw in her vision. I felt like maybe if she knew what was coming, she could do something to stop it. She could change the course of his life. Of all of our lives.”

“And how did that work out for you?” she asked, crossing her arms as she flicked her gaze up and down my bruised and battered body. “Did you have a good talk?”

“No, smartass. She was already gone,” I said, drinking down the suffocating feeling of doom that kept creeping up from the hollows of my chest. Maybe if I’d have listened to the pull sooner, things might have worked out differently, but I supposed I’d never really know.

“Then the Roderick sisters already got to her?” asked Gabriel, pausing over the wound he was cleaning.

“It’s looking that way,” I said, trying not to sound as discouraged as I felt.

“You mean to tell me that this thing that’s been prophesied for millennia is now on course to play out exactly as it was foretold? Well, that’s a shocker,” said Tessa in a tone that was precisely the opposite of shocked.

It was her giant ‘I told you so’ in my face but I took it on the chin, knowing I had it coming. I didn’t bother telling her that I had yet to buy into the whole prophesy thing yet.Something about not being in control of our own destiny—of not being able to choose our own path—just didn’t sit right with me.

“I know you think it was stupid and pointless, but I had to do it…I had to at leasttry.”

“So, if Nikki wasn’t at her house when you got there then who did this to you?” asked Ben as he leaned his hip against the kitchen table and fiddled with his piercing, frowning at my bruised face.

“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” said Dominic, suddenly standing in the entryway of the kitchen, his arms crossed along his chest and a dark, sullen look in his eyes.

Despite the disapproving look and his barely tepid greeting, the only thing I wanted to do just then was run to him and bury myself so deep into his arms that he’d never be able to detach from me.

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