Page 22 of Illusory (The Marked Saga #8)

I texted Dominic to meet me upstairs as soon as Gabriel left my room. After talking to Gabriel and realizing just how confused I really was regarding my relationship with Dominic, I decided that it had gone on long enough and that it was time to confront him. Despite my trembling hands and racing heart, and the very real fear that this one conversation could spell the end of us for good, I knew it needed to happen and that I would accept whatever I had coming, so long as it was coming from a place of truth.

No more games. No more mixed messages. No more waiting for things to magically work themselves out. I was going to demand answers from him, and I had every intention of getting them, one way or another. Even if I had to force them out of him with my bare hands.

The knock at my door sent my heart into a frenzy even though I had been standing right in front of it for the last five minutes, waiting for him to show up.

I can do this. I totally got this. Whatever happens happens , I told myself as I pulled in a calming breath, squared my shoulders and then opened the door. All my bravado and confidence went down the toilet as I looked up and saw his already shuttered eyes.

He glanced over my shoulder into my room but didn’t move to take a step forward. “You said it was urgent,” he said, sounding annoyed, as though he’d expected there to be a fire in my room or a couple of Revenants that needed vanquishing.

“It is.” I stepped back, holding the door open for him.

He exhaled sharply and then walked in, both hands buried deep in his pocket as he turned around to face me, his throat bobbing on a swallow as he met my eyes. I pressed my back against the door and shut it, leaning there for a moment as I tried to summon the courage to have this conversation with him. To lay my heart at his feet once again where he could so readily stomp on it.

“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 you want to 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 jaw tensed 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 to understand . “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?

But it had never been a secret that Trace was my soulmate —he’d known that from day one—and that never stopped Dominic from pursuing me before, nor did it stop me from letting him. So, why had that suddenly changed?

Why did it matter to him now?

“I don’t understand,” I said my shoulders dropping as I searched his face for answers. “This isn’t a new development. Why does that suddenly matter to you now?”

“Because he Turned,” he stated simply, as though that cleared everything up. As though it were so obvious that even a fool could see it. “He isn’t dead or newly returned from the grave, or incapacitated with a fractured mind or in a permanent sleep state that rendered him useless to you. He is here, angel, in one piece, and he’s going to need you now more than ever. And you’re going to go to him because he’s your soulmate. Because you love him,” he said knowingly as though it had always been in the cards.

“But I love you too. You know that I do.”

“And what of it, love?” he asked sadly. “What will that matter when you feel the call of your soulmate pulling you? You will go, because that is the way destiny works, and because that’s the kind of woman you are. You love and you give freely, and you go when you are needed. You may stumble along the way and misstep every now and then, but you always do the right thing for the ones you love.” There was a twinkle of pride in his eyes then like he admired those things about me. “He can fulfill you now and he will. We both know it, and denying it is only going to prolong the inevitable pain I’m going to feel when you choose him.”

Everything inside me clenched painfully. “You don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, tears stinging the corners of my eyes. “You can’t know that because I don’t even know.”

“You would know if I stopped getting in the way.”

“What? No ,” I hissed, my tears spilling over from both eyes. It hurt too much to breathe let alone to drum up the effort required to pretend this wasn’t breaking me. “You’re not in the way. You’ve never been in the way.”

How could he not see that? How could he not see that he had saved my life? That he stopped my lungs from imploding when I couldn’t breathe. That he painstakingly put my heart back together when it was too crushed and disfigured to beat properly. How could he not know that he was the one that made it possible for me to keep going when I couldn’t fathom taking even a single step forward anymore?

“You’re everything to me, Dominic. You saved me when I couldn’t save myself. You’re the reason I’m even alive right now.”

He paused, letting my words linger in the air between us for a moment, as though he wanted to memorize their sound if only to pull them out again on a rainy day when he needed them most. And then the sadness returned. “That may be so, angel, but losing him will always be the reason you didn’t want to be alive,” he said, his own eyes glistening with heartbreak and sorrow that mirrored my own perfectly. “A life spent without your intended would be a life spent incomplete, and I would sooner die than watch you live half a life. You deserve the stars, angel, all of them, and I would pull them down from the sky for you if I could. But I can never compete with that.”

My heart shattered in my chest. I was sure of it. I could feel the fissures spidering through each valve and severing it, piece by fucking piece.

“I don’t want you to compete. It’s not a competition and I’m not a prize—I’m the asshole here. I’m the one to blame for all of it,” I said, not because I wanted his pity or sympathy but because it was the cold, hard truth. “I’m the one hurting you both and I hate myself for it every day, but you still don’t get to decide. Not you. Not Trace. Not the Fates. Not even Heaven or Hell. No one is going to tell me who I’m going to be with. No one is deciding for me. Not even you.”

He smiled back at me, a small, hapless smile that hurt just to look at. “There will come a time one day when you are sitting comfortably in your home, possibly around a fire reading a book, and you will look back on your time spent with me and think about the things that we shared. I want you to smile when you think of me, angel. I want you to know that I did this for you. That perhaps I had some small part in pulling down the stars and ensuring that you got the fairytale life you deserve. The one that I could not provide for you. Allow me at least the dignity of that.”

I started to shake my head, a gut-wrenching sob working its way up my throat, and then startled as a loud knock at the door interrupted us.

“We need you downstairs in the living room,” said Tessa from the other side of the door, her tone pressed. “Now.”