Page 65 of Illusory

My stomach dropped out of my body at his words.

“Not if we don’t let him,” answered Dominic, as though it were as simple as that. As though we weren’t talking about playing Russian roulette with a loaded vampire and my damned life. “The only thing preventing him from leaving this cell and rejoining the world of the living is his inability to control himself around Jemma and that isn’t going to change if he doesn’t stop denying himself the one thing he craves.”

“I’m not drinking her blood,” spat Trace as though the idea of it revolted him.

“Oh, but you are, Romeo, and you’re going to savor every last drop of it,” crooned Dominic. “Now be a good Reaper and come out and join us.”

“Fuck you,” growled Trace as he barreled toward him like a raging bull, his arms reaching out through the bars, desperate to swing at Dominic as though he wanted to rip him apart with his bare hands.

The floor shook beneath my feet as he pounded against the bars, and I scrambled back, yelping as Dominic just stood there and clicked his tongue at him.

“I’ve already told you, Romeo. You’re not my type.”

Trace slammed into the bars again. “I’m going to fucking kill you!”

“Stop! Just stop!” I cried out, my voice and heartbeat spiking hysterically. “We shouldn’t have come down here.This was a bad idea,” I said, glaring at Dominic. “He doesn’t want to do it, and we’re not going to force him.” Not today and not ever.

How the heck had we gotten here? Fighting each other over who should and shouldn’t be drinking my blood? The more the scene unfolded, the more I realized how sick this entire thing was.Wewere sick, the whole lot of us. How damn far had we all tumbled from grace to be standing around in the basement cellar having this argument?

I pushed on my heel and turned, ready to put this entire nightmare behind me.

“You hear that, Romeo?” asked Dominic, causing me to falter despite my best intentions to run away from it all. “She thinks you don’t want to do this—that you don’t wanther.

My heart squeezed in my chest. What was he playing atnow?

“She doesn’t know that tasting her again is the only thing you think about from the moment you open your eyes,” he continued smoothly as though he had been privy to all of Trace’s deepest darkest secrets. “Isn’t it?”

With my heart in my throat, I turned slowly and met Trace’s eyes. They were fixed on me, boring into me like a jarring revelation, speaking their truth in the form of one agonizing look.

“Are you going to let her just leave here without telling her the truth?” goaded Dominic. “Without allowing yourself even a taste?”

“That’s enough,” snapped Gabriel, his mouth screwed into a snarl. “He already said no!”

“All you have to do is come and get it,” purred Dominic, ignoring Gabriel as he continued to coax Trace into some kind of submissive trance. “She’s yours for the taking.”

Trace tightened his hold on the bars, his knuckleswhitening with strain as a storm of emotions rushed across his face. Beaten down, he dropped his head. “I don’t want…to hurt her,” he gritted out, the burgeoning war inside of him coating every word. It was written all over his face, in the deep furrow of his brows and the way he pressed his forehead against the bars in defeat.

My breath stalled in my throat.

“You won’t—Iwon’tletyou hurt her,” promised Dominic, and despite my erratic heart and spiraling thoughts telling me this was a horrible, dangerous idea, even I believed him then. “This is the only way to be able to be with her again. That is what you want, isn’t it? To be with her? To help her and keep her safe?”

Silence descended on all of us as I waited for Trace to put the final nail in my coffin. To finally show them with his own words, once and for all, what he felt about me. That he despised me. That he wanted me gone from his life.

“She’s the only thing I want,” murmured Trace and my heart nearly punched a hole through my chest.

I was certain I’d just hallucinated.

“Of course she is.” Dominic nodded knowingly, confirming that he had in fact said precisely what Dominic knew he’d say, and then turned to Gabriel who was scrubbing a palm down the length of his face. “Keys, brother.”

Gabriel glanced back at me and waited expectantly. Preoccupied with Trace’s admission, it took me a second to realize he was waiting for me—for my permission to unlock the door and set Trace loose, bloodlust and all.

My gaze slid from him to Trace and then to Dominic before swinging back around, questioning whether we were doing the right thing here or whether we had all collectively lost our minds. In that moment, standing in the basement of my house with three lethal vampires, it was a very realpossibility.

Then again, what was the alternative? Leaving him locked in his prison cell in a perpetual state of hunger for the rest of his days? That didn’t really seem like an option either. At least not a good one.

Swallowing against the dryness in my throat, I nodded.

“Are you absolutely sure this is what you want to do?” asked Gabriel, his expression brimming with worry about all the ways this could go sideways. I was too but neither of us bothered to say any of it out loud.

---