Page 93 of Illusory

I crinkled my nose at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

He chanced a peek and then turned to face me when he saw that I was fully clothed. “There was something I needed to get in my room here,” he said as he pulled a strange rope-like trinket from his pocket. “For that thing you still haven’t asked me to help you with.”

“Oh. Right.” For obvious reasons, I’d completely forgotten about the whole porting thing.

“I didn’t bring you here to do that, you know,” he said, gesturing with his chin to the spot against the wall that we had been pressed up against mere minutes ago. “It wasn’t some ploy to fuck you.”

I tucked my hair behind my ears, feeling my cheeks warm. “I know that.”

He eyed me for a minute, his gaze lancing over mine as though he were trying to figure something out.

“What?” I asked as I fought the urge to squirm under his intense stare.

“Do you love him more than you love me?” he asked suddenly, making my stomach drop and my heart feel as though it had been put in a meat grinder.

My breathing stalled as I looked back at him and somberlyshook my head. “No.”

He thought about it for a second. “But you don’t love me more than him either,” he guessed.

“No,” I said again.

He nodded, not looking surprised by that for some reason. “This isn’t going to end well for me, is it?”

Something dark and sad and foreboding clawed into my heart and settled in as though it had no intention of ever leaving me for the rest of my life. “I don’t think it’s going to end well for any of us.”

29. THE POINT OF NO RETURN

We ported back to the kitchen a short while later and were promptly greeted by two very pissed off vampires in the form of Dominic and Gabriel. The second the room stabilized enough for me to take a step back from Trace, Dominic was off, barreling across the kitchen so swiftly that my tired human eyes hadn’t been able to track him.

He crashed into Trace with the force of an avalanche that made the floor beneath my unsteady feet rumble in anger as the two of them sailed backwards through the air and then slammed against the ground.

Dominic’s fist came down so hard that I thought I’d heard the sound of bone crunching as he perched atop Trace’s chest and rained down blow after blow in a blur that whipped like the wind.

I froze, a scream lodged in my mouth as I stood there immovable, my body all but calcified into stone.

A snarl thundered from Trace, half growl, half battle cry, and then he was matching Dominic’s hits tit for tat as the two of them mercilessly pounded their fists into each other, unleashing all of their rage and hatred and frustration into the other, as if it were warranted. As if it weren’tmewho was solely responsible for all of this.

“Stop,” I finally cried out, the word so paralyzed by fear that it was barely audible to my ears. The house rattled again as Trace slammed Dominic onto his back, the ground spitting out tremor after tremor as blood marred their features and clothing, coating everything around them like an oil spill.

They were going to kill each other right there in mykitchen if I didn’t do something. If I didn’t find a way to stop them. The realization jolted me from my frozen stupor.

“Stop!” I screeched, louder this time, and then kicked off the ground, bolting toward them with my arms outstretched and my stomach in knots, but was promptly yanked backward before I could reach either one of them.

Gabriel’s arm coiled around my waist like a vice as he dragged me backwards, away from the warring gods and the swinging arms and spraying blood, and back to the safety of my useless corner.

“Gabriel! Let me go,” I roared back into his face, but he only held me tighter, refusing to loosen his hold on me, to let me fix the mess I’d created. “They’re going to kill each other!”

Couldn’t he see that? Couldn’t he see how this was all my fault? That I needed to be the one to stop this?

“They won’t,” he answered calmly, as though they weren’t trying to disfigure each other with their bare hands. “This is between the two of them, Jemma. They need to get it out of their system.”

“No, they don’t! They don’t need to do this,” I yelled at him like the lunatic he obviously was, my panicked gaze darting back and forth between him and the horror scene unfolding before me, powerless to stop any of it.

Bile sloshed up the back of my throat as they flipped back the other way, bodies slamming into furniture and elbows, their fists still raining down hits like battle axes swinging down from the sky.

The blood was everywhere, smeared all over the floor and coming from so many places that I couldn’t tell where one injury ended and the other one started. They weren’t going to stop until one of them was dead and the realization made my body shake all over.

“Let me fucking go!” I roared, bucking against Gabriel’shold as I threw my weight against his arm, trying to find a weak point to break free. Slapping and pushing and clawing at him until my nails were digging holes into his flesh.

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