Page 71 of Illusory

“What is this about?” he asked when I still hadn’t worked up the nerve to say anything to him.

“It’s about us.”

“Care to be more specific, love?” he asked coolly.

I knew I needed to stop dancing around the issue. That I needed to ask him point blank where the two of us stood. In fact, I had a whole speech prepared for him on the topic, but standing there in front of him, feeling unsure and exposed and small, I didn’t have the courage to come out with any of it.

“Why are you doing all this?” I asked him instead, needing in that moment to understand him better—to understand what his intentions were and whether this was just another one of his games.

“Doing what?”

“Staying here. Helping me. Helping Trace.”

“I’m doing what needs to be done,” he answered pointedly as though that was all there was to it.

“But why you? And why now?” I asked, still not bothering to move any closer to him. “Why did you involve yourself when Gabriel was already helping Trace.”

He scoffed in disdain. “My brother is the last person on earth who should be teaching anyone how to be a Revenant. At the rate he was going, it would have been months before Romeo could stand to be in your presence without attacking you, let alone be able to teach you anything.”

I thought about that for a second. “So, you’re doing this so that Trace can teach me how to port?”

“Is that so hard to believe?”

I narrowed my eyes. “And that’s the only reason?”

His shoulders squared and I swore he got taller just then. “What other reason would there be?”

“I don’t know,” I said, even though my answer was already on the tip of my tongue. “I just can’t help feeling like you’re somehow…pushing me toward Trace. Pushing me to be with him.” The words felt twisted and deranged even as they left my mouth, but I couldn’t seem to shake the odd feeling no matter what I did.

He smiled darkly, shrugging his shoulders as if to play it off. “Perhaps you’re seeing what youwantto see.”

“No.” I shook my head confidently. “I don’t think that I am,” I said, scrutinizing his dark eyes and pursed lips and stiff shoulders and clenched hands. “I think you’re hiding something from me. I just don’t know what it is.”

“Are you quite done yet?”

I ignored his question and his bored tone and shoved off the door, finally garnering the courage to move closer to him. “Why did you go searching for me yesterday?” I asked, taking another slow step toward him, and then another. “Why did you hire Isa to make sure I’m eating properly? Why did you refuse to leave my side after you healed me when you could have just as easily went on about your business? Why did you—”

“Why do you think?” he cut in gruffly, his boundless eyes still pinned on mine as though there were a novel’s worth of things he wanted to tell me then, to confess to me.

Or maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. Maybe I was still just seeing what I wanted to see again. Seeing things that weren’t really there anymore.

Needing to know for sure, I closed the remaining space between us, stopping just short of touching him. His jawtensed at my uninvited proximity.

“Because you care about what happens to me,” I tested softly, my voice barely above a whisper. When he didn’t deny it, I sidled closer, pushing up on my toes to catch his gaze. His dark eyes flicked up to mine and stayed there. “Because you still love me,” I said, my words coming out more like a question than a statement of fact.

“Dammit, angel. You know that I do,” he said so quietly that I nearly doubted I’d heard him say it.

My heart came alive in my chest, slamming every which way as it devoured his admission and the way his eyes were burning with fire for me as he’d said it. But I had to reign it in again. I had tounderstand. “But then why won’t you show me? Why won’t you touch me anymore?”

He stared back at me for a long, harrowing moment, heady emotions churning in his eyes and making them glimmer back at me. Regret. Longing. Loss. So much of everything that it nearly knocked the breath out of my lungs. “I’m trying very hard to do the right thing by you.”

I frowned at that. “How is pushing me away doing right by me?”

“Because he’s your soulmate,” he said in a low, broken voice that gutted out the entirety of my heart in one fatal swoop. And I finally understood.

This wasn’t about us or how he felt about me. It was about me and Trace.

He wasn’t pushing me away because he didn’t want me anymore or because he’d lost his feelings for me after what happened with his sire. He was pushing me toward something else—toward Trace because…because why? Because he thought we belonged together? Because the Fates had deemed it so?

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