Page 37 of Illusory (The Marked Saga #8)

Thick droplets of rain beat against the bay windows as the forecasted storm slowly rolled off the coast and began to make its way toward us. I was sitting at the head of the kitchen table, sandwiched between Trace and Dominic on either side of me and a plate of Isa’s chicken and potatoes in front of me. A plate that was making my mouth water.

Better my mouth than…other places.

As awkward as I felt with both Dominic and Trace staring me down like I was a Michelin star meal they’d been waiting weeks to eat, the prospect of finally putting food in my stomach seemed to break the spell I’d been in and turned all my focus and energy into getting a taste of Isa’s lemon pepper chicken instead of, well, them .

Note to self: use food to bury unwanted feelings .

Biting back a smile, I picked up the fork and knife and dug in.

The second the heavenly goodness hit my tongue, I knew I’d made the right decision coming downstairs, despite having had to go through the two of them to get here. It was so worth it. The woman was a sorceress. There was no other way to explain her ability to do what she did with food.

I quickly cut another piece of the chicken and then scooped up some of the garlic potatoes before popping both into my mouth. Half a dozen different flavors vied for my attention, making me work doubly hard not to moan out loud or roll my eyes into the back of my head like I was having a religious experience.

Because that was literally the last thing they needed to see. Not that I’d looked up and met either of their eyes. I was far too busy eating my feelings and avoiding eye contact with either of them to do that. But I could still feel them and their heavy gazes weighing me down like a soaking wet blanket.

Despite my best intention to ignore them for as long as possible, it still only took a few more dragged-out moments of my knife scraping frantically against the plate and the internal sound of my chewing being played on a megaphone in my head before I cracked from the pressure and broke the silence first.

“Didn’t you have something you wanted to talk to me about?” I asked and then finally looked up to meet their gazes. “Or are you guys just going to watch me eat the whole time?”

Dominic cleared his throat and nodded to Trace. “Care to do the honors, Romeo ?”

Oh no. For fuck’s sake . I immediately cringed, already mourning my delicious dinner that was surely going to get flung across the table as I anticipated Trace going ballistic on Dominic for using the nickname we all knew he despised, but the strangest thing happened instead. Nothing at all.

Apparently, Trace was far too preoccupied staring at my mouth to bother noticing it.

I swallowed hard, my mouthful going down like a jagged rock. “Trace…?”

His mesmerized gaze jumped up to meet my eyes as his pupils constricted back to normal. “Yeah?”

“You…you said you wanted to talk,” I reminded him gently.

He nodded but didn’t say anything as he watched me cut another piece of chicken and pop that into my mouth too. As famished as I was, it was taking an insane amount of effort to remain ladylike and not scarf down the whole plate in one fell swoop. All things considered, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it.

“Why didn’t you choose me?” he asked suddenly, the shock of his question nearly making me choke on the piece of chicken I had in my mouth.

“ What ?” I coughed out violently as I grabbed the glass of water on the table and took a giant swig, trying to compose myself before swallowing everything down at once.

“That isn’t what we discussed,” reminded Dominic, his tone clipped.

“I need to know why,” answered Trace without taking his eyes off me.

I brought the water glass to my lips again and slowly gulped down half the glass before setting it back down on the table. Mostly I was trying to buy myself some time to figure out how to answer his question without inflicting further damage onto him. Plus, I really wanted to be able to finish my dinner after answering him.

That was, if I even still had an appetite.

I drew in a long, ragged breath and came up empty of any good ways to answer him other than with the truth. “I already told you the other night, Trace. I’m not going to choose—”

“I know what you said,” he cut in calmly, “but he stepped down.”

I blinked at him, unsure where he was going with it, but knowing it was someplace dark and desolate.

“He stepped down, and you still didn’t choose me.”

This was bad. Like cataclysmically bad. I didn’t want to have this conversation. No good would come of this conversation. “This is not…I don’t want to…I just—I think I should go,” I decided and stood up to leave but Trace placed his hand on mine, and everything slowed down to a crawl.

“Please sit, Jemma. I promise I’m going somewhere with this.” His blue eyes were boring holes right into my soul. “You owe me at least that much, don’t you?”

My shoulders slumped forward, and I faltered, knowing that I owed him so much more than that. He had questions and regardless of the turmoil I felt inside, I owed him answers. Gingerly, I sat back down at the table and folded my hands in my lap.

“Why didn’t you choose me?” he asked again.

“It’s not like that, Trace. It’s not about choosing one or the other.” I shook my head because it had never been about that. “It’s about the fact that I can’t choose. I’m in love with both of you and I know that will never change. Choosing one of you, whether by choice or force, would only ever condemn you to live a life with someone who could only give you half her heart.”

What kind of life would that be for either one of them? And what kind of a person would I be to knowingly do that to them? And for what? So that I don’t end up alone?

“You’re worthy of so much more than a broken girl, Trace. Maybe you can’t see it now—not yet—but I’m doing this for you. For both of you. I would rather die completely alone than make either of you live a life with someone who can only ever give you half her fucking heart. You deserve so much more than that. You deserve to have it all.”

Couldn’t they see that? Couldn’t they see that I was doing this for them?

The haunted look in his eyes was back. “And if it had been the other way around? If I told you right here and now that I’d be willing to back off…would you choose him?” he asked, lifting his chin to Dominic.

“No.” I didn’t even have to think about it. I may not have always been the best girlfriend or even a decent one, but I could at least give them that dignity. “I’d never do that to you, Trace. I wouldn’t do that to either of you.”

He thought about it for a moment and then sank back in his chair, nodding. “Okay.”

“Okay?” Okay what ?

“I just needed to know for sure.”

“Well, thank you for that,” muttered Dominic, shooting an annoyed look over to Trace. “Now that we’ve established yet again that she isn’t going to choose either one of us, would you care to discuss what we actually planned on discussing with her?”

“ Planned?” I repeated as I narrowed my eyes at both of them. “Since when do the two of you plan anything together?”

“Since you decided to freeze us both out,” answered Trace, his dimples practically blaring their disapproval at me.

“That’s not what—” I stopped myself because I totally did freeze them out. There was no point in denying it. “What else was I supposed to do?” I asked rhetorically as I pushed my plate away. “Just because I’m the one that happened to realize we were doomed first doesn’t mean this isn’t hard for me too. It doesn’t mean I’m not hurting just as much as you are.”

“Good. Then we’re on the same page,” said Dominic, a pleased smile teasing his lips.

Except we weren’t on the same page at all.

“I don’t know what page you think we’re on, but it doesn’t change anything, Dominic. There’s still no future for us, and frankly, I kind of thought you of all people would have already seen that by now,” I added that last part more quietly. Dominic was nothing if not a realist and should have already reached the same bleak conclusion I had.

Then again, I shouldn’t have been that surprised that he hadn’t. They were both unequivocally in love with me and I knew better than most that loving eyes could never see what was staring them right in the face.

“It’s more a matter of not accepting it rather than one of seeing it,” informed Dominic as he scooted his chair in closer to me and then propped his elbow on the table, smirking as he angled his body to me. Warmth spread from my chest outward as his gaze flicked from my eyes to my mouth and then back again. “See, we’ve had some time to think about things, Romeo and I, and we’ve decided that we don’t like this new dynamic very much. In fact, we don’t like it at all.”

My brows furrowed. “New dynamic?”

“He’s talking about the part where we don’t get to be with you anymore,” clarified Trace, making my heart do a strange dip and dive in my chest.

“Precisely. And since necessity is the mother of invention, we’ve decided to come to an agreement of sorts. One that would be mutually beneficial for all of us.”

My gaze darted back and forth between the two of them. An agreement? Between the two of them? A mutually beneficial one? “I…I don’t understand.”

“We want things to go back to the way they were before,” supplied Trace, leaning forward in his chair, encroaching on my space and making it hard for me to concentrate.

Frankly, both of them were entirely too close for my brain to be able to make sense out of the gibberish that was coming out of their mouths.

“Before when ?” I practically laughed the words out. “When I was going back and forth between the two of you like a Ping-Pong ball? Or before when you were trying to kill each other?” I jumped up from my chair, sending it screeching backwards several feet behind me.

The two of them sprang up from their chairs right along with me, in unison, and again I laughed. This was insane . Like literal insanity. Either they had finally cracked and lost their minds entirely or this was some kind of sick, twisted game they were playing to get back at me for hurting them.

And I really didn’t want to believe it was the latter.

“You’ve both lost it,” I decided and started to turn to storm out of the room, but Dominic grabbed my elbow and pulled me back before I could get anywhere, his eyes pleading and desperate. “Let me go, Dominic!”

“Admit you want the same thing, and I will. Admit you’re just as unhappy as we are.”

The floor felt as though it were undulating beneath me, conspiring to knock me on my ass. I tried to find something solid to hold on to, but there was nothing there at all anymore.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked, my voice small and wrought with hurt. “Why are you messing with me like this? Is this some kind of joke to you? Because it’s not funny—it’s cruel,” I said and tried to walk away again, but he kept me right there before him with nowhere to look but into those glittering pools of sin that had been my undoing so many times before.

“No more games, angel. No more pretending.”

My chest squeezed again because I could see the sincerity in his eyes, but it only made it that much more difficult for me to understand. “Then what? What are you saying to me right now?”

“We’re saying we’re fucking miserable without you, Jemma,” said Trace stepping up beside him as though they were some united front against my crumbling heart. “We’re saying neither one of us want this .”

I blinked at him, desperately trying to stop my ears from ringing in my head. “Well, this is it, Trace. There is no other option but this . This is exactly where we’d been heading all this time—I was just too stupid to realize it before.” I laughed again, but it was a broken, humorless thing. “I can’t choose and that’s never going to change no matter how long we try to drag this thing out for—”

“I’m not telling you to choose,” he said softly.

I stared at him, blinking back the tears that were welling in my eyes as I tried to process what he was telling me, but I couldn’t make it fit right. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Trace. This isn’t you. You’re—” I shook my head, trying to find the right words to explain this all away. “You’re not yourself right now. You just Turned—your emotions are all over the place. You have to give it more time.”

He stepped toward me, crowding out my space and thoughts and the sound of my wailing heart. “No amount of time is going to make me be okay without you, Jemma. This life. A future. Love. Taking another fucking breath. I don’t want any of it if it’s not with you. Don’t you get that?”

I couldn’t pull in enough air to fill my lungs—I was hyperventilating.

“We’re not asking you to commit to anything, angel. We’re just asking you to keep an open mind.”

“An open mind to what ?” I gasped between breaths. “To dating you both at the same time?”

“ Separately at the same time,” clarified Dominic, as if that made this any better or clearer or different. “We’re not asking for anything more than what we had before .”

“What we had before was a mess and you were both miserable,” I reminded him because apparently, I was the only one who remembered the amount of blood they’d shed last week alone.

“We’re more miserable now,” argued Trace, the pain etched into his face like a permanent scar. “It was a mess because we wouldn’t stop fighting each other. Because we hated each other and wanted to win. But it’s different now.”

“How could it be different?” I said, shaking my head at the impossibility of it. “You hate each other.”

“He hated me because I’m your soulmate and he wasn’t. And I hated him because he wasn’t your soulmate and you loved him anyway. But all that shit did was force you to choose when you weren’t ready, and we both lost you because of it,” he explained, his blue eyes glimmering as if to show me how sincere he was. As if to prove to me just how low he had sunken into the depths of despair without me. “But I can’t lose you, Jemma. I won’t .”

But I already knew he’d only sink lower if I agreed to this. These were the words of a desperate man, a man gripping on for dear life, and they would surely come back to haunt him in the end. He just couldn’t see that right now. He couldn’t see any of it. But I sure as hell did.

“Listen to me, Trace. I know it hurts right now; believe me I know . But it will get better in time. It will. It won’t hurt as much and eventually you’ll get over me and move on. But this…this situation —going backwards like this—that won’t get better. We’d only be prolonging the inevitable and eventually, we’d just end up right back here anyway. We’d self-destruct, all three of us, and that’s if the guilt doesn’t eat me alive first.”

“No guilt, angel. No strings. No expectations,” said Dominic, his tone begging me to give it a chance. “We go into this knowing where we stand, and we leave everything open and undefined.”

The hollow, broken pieces of my heart clanked around in my chest, trying to piece themselves together.

“And what? You’re just going to happily share me between the two of you? Rotate evenings and weekends?” I asked aghast, mostly at myself because for the briefest of seconds, I almost let myself consider it.

“We’ve been sharing you since the day we met you,” reminded Dominic, his lip twitching as though he wanted to smile at that, though Trace didn’t seem quite as pleased with the comment as he was.

“That’s not…that’s different .” While technically true, it had never been intentional. Only a consequence of my inability to choose after months of death and possession and amnesia and other things that constantly blurred the line between all of us. But mostly because of the undeniable pull I’d always felt toward the both of them since the very moment I’d laid eyes on them. But it was different now. I knew better now.

I mean…didn’t I?

“All we’re asking is that you don’t shut us out. That’s it,” said Trace, drawing my attention back to him as he ducked down to level his eyes with mine. “We just want it to go back to the way it was, and we can figure out the rest later.”

“Later when, Trace? When it’s time to decide who’s going to take me to prom? Or later like when we decide who’s sleeping in my bed tonight?”

Dominic swallowed roughly as Trace crossed his arms.

“Or maybe we should just wait until way later,” I went on tartly, “like when it’s time to buy a house and we need to figure out if we’re going with a one bedroom or three.”

Absolute. Dead. Silence.

Neither one said anything as I effectively shattered whatever bubble they had deluded themselves into.

“Exactly.” I took a small step back, my gaze meeting each of theirs pointedly. “This isn’t what you want. Neither of you want this. You’re settling for scraps because it’s still fresh and it hurts like hell, and right now scraps seem a lot better than nothing at all. But I’ll be damned if I ever let either of you get anything less than the world you fucking deserve,” I said and then stepped between the two of them to leave.

And this time, they let me go.