Chapter 44
The rain rapped gently against the windows as Trace and Dominic stared back at me as though I had just suggested something so spectacularly unhinged that neither of them knew where to begin with it.
Dominic recovered first, his expression morphing into something I recognized immediately and liked considerably less up close.
It was a careful, almost manufactured softening around the eyes.
The kind that rarely showed up on his face, and usually only when he thought the situation called for gentleness rather than honesty.
Frankly, it looked a whole lot like pity.
“Angel.” My name sounded low and soft on his lips, almost placating. “That isn’t how it works. You know that’s not possible.”
“But it is possible.” The cast-iron certainty came out before I’d even finished the thought. “I’ve been to the past before, Dominic. Trace took me to see my father. I know it can be done.”
Dominic’s expression didn’t change. If anything, the pity only deepened. He turned to Trace as though handing off the conversation to someone who was more qualified to have it.
Trace’s cool hand came over mine, squeezing it gently. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to read my thoughts and decipher what the hell was going on in my head or if he was trying to use the bond to help calm me down.
“Both,” he answered, his brows pinching together with concern.
“I have to do this, Trace. It’s the only way to bring them back.”
“I know it feels like you need to do this, but you can’t change things in the past, Jemma,” he answered evenly as though that were the end of it. “You already know that.”
“No. That’s bullshit!” Pulling my hand back, I threw the covers off me and hurled myself off the bed. They both watched as I moved, their eyes almost synchronized as they tracked me across the room. “We don’t change anything. That’s not the same thing. It doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, holding onto the certainty that had been burning in my chest since the moment the dream slammed back into me. It wasn’t just a dream. It was more. It was a key cut for a lock I hadn’t even known I was going to need to open until now.
“Jemma—”
“I have to fix this. I’m going to fix this,” I cut in, refusing to back down. To listen to reason or excuses. “I just need to go back to the last chance I had to stop this. Before the Order came. Before they trapped us in Sanguinarium.”
Trace unfolded himself from where he was kneeling beside the bed and rose to his full height.
My eyes moved over him before I could stop them.
He’d changed at some point while I was lost inside my own head—loose jeans and a white t-shirt that sat against his shoulders in a way that would have been very distracting under any other circumstances.
His shadow fell over me as he closed the gap between us and dropped his eyes to mine.
“I know you’re hurting right now, but this isn’t the way,” he said, his words hitting me harder than he’d probably meant them to.
“You can’t just rewrite the past and walk back out the other side.
It doesn’t work that way. Changing things in the past will only create a Ripple.
Especially the wrong things. You could erase the version of yourself who made the choice to go back in the first place.
Which erases the port. Which means it never happened. ”
An uncomfortable shiver brushed over my skin.
“You’d disappear from your own Timeline,” he said, his jaw ticking once. “You know that.”
I did know. He’d explained it to me the day he’d ported me back to Florida to see my dad.
The day that had cracked me open in all the right ways and put something back into that I’d thought I’d lost forever.
A day I would never forget or stop being grateful for, no matter how many more days or months or years I had left.
But it still didn’t change anything.
“I don’t care if I erase myself,” I admitted. “If it stops them from being killed, then I’m willing to take that risk.”
“And what? We’re supposed to just stand here and let you wipe yourself out of existence?” His voice turned rougher, the careful gentleness stripped right out of it. “That isn’t a plan, Jemma. It’s suicide.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. For all we know, the Order lied about that too. They lie about everything,” I reminded him, knowing full well that wasn’t going to change a damn thing, let alone his mind.
“I’m still not going to let you be the fucking lab rat on this.”
My head jerked back at his words. “Let me?”
“Yeah. Let you.” He pushed forward, closing out what little space remained between us, his eyes dropping back to mine.
“You’re my soulmate, Jemma. Watching you erase yourself is not something I’m ever going to let happen without a fight.
If that makes me a piece of shit, then so be it.
” Something fierce and immovable moved through his expression.
“I didn’t come back from the dead twice to lose you like this. ”
The words hit somewhere deep and tender, and for a moment I just stood there inside them.
It wasn’t like I wanted to die. The goal wasn’t to erase myself from my life or cease to exist altogether and leave them here without me.
But how was I supposed to go on living as though Tessa and Gabriel and Ares were just collateral damage?
As though losing them like this wasn’t going to eat away at me for the rest of my life?
“You can’t just expect me to let this go,” I said, my voice cracking at the edges despite my best efforts remain composed. Angry, grief-stricken tears burned beneath my lids. “To do nothing. To just sit here and wait for The Order to come back and finish the job.”
“I don’t expect you to do any of that,” he said, shaking his head as he blew out a breath.
“But you have to be smart about this. Right now your grief is just sitting on your chest making you feel like you’re drowning.
And you know what people do when they’re drowning?
They panic. They make stupid mistakes. And that’s exactly the way the Order wants you. ”
I pressed my lips together as his words hit me harder than I’d wanted them to.
Because he wasn’t wrong. I’d done exactly that a hundred times before.
Made decisions out of fear and grief and panic.
Run straight into things with both hands out and my brain fully switched off, and I had the body count to show for it.
But this wasn’t that.
“I know what it looks like,” I said, lifting my chin.
“I know you think I’m not thinking straight.
But I am.” I held his gaze and refused to look away from it.
“My Alt did it, Trace. She ported herself back and turned you into a Revenant right before my eyes. She changed the outcome of something that had already happened.”
Something moved across his face. A fault line. Barely visible, but there.
“If my Alt was able to do it then it means it can be done,” I pushed, needing him to see that this wasn’t just a half-baked idea I pulled out of nowhere. “There has to be a way.”
“We don’t know what was at play when she did it,” he said, slower than before, the certainty in it worn down just slightly at the edges.
“There could have been safeguards. A tether, a spell, something we have no access to on this Timeline. We can’t just assume she walked in without protection and came out the other side clean. ”
“Then we do the same thing,” I said. “We find out what she used and we build the same safeguards.”
His jaw tightened. “How? We don’t know what she did, Jemma. Come on. Use your head.”
“I am using my head!” The words came out louder than I meant them to, bouncing off the walls and hanging in the air between us. I pulled in a breath through my nose and tried again, quieter. “I am. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
He looked at me for a heartbeat, something working behind his eyes that he wasn’t saying out loud.
I knew what it was. I could feel it through the bond—not the argument, not the logic, but the fear.
The raw, animal fear of losing me that was dressed up in reason because that was the only way he knew how to hold it.
He couldn’t see past it. That was the problem. He was looking at this through the lens of everything he stood to lose, and it was making the rest of the picture go dark around the edges. But I wasn’t looking at it that way. I couldn’t afford to.
I could feel in my chest that I was supposed to do this.
Not in the way that panic felt or grief felt or the desperate, clawing need to fix something unfixable.
This was different. Quieter. It sat underneath all of that noise like bedrock, solid and unmovable, the kind of knowing that didn’t need to announce itself.
I felt it in my heart, like a second heartbeat that was louder and stronger and bigger than anything inside me.
“I know I’m supposed to do this, Trace. I can feel it,” I said, pressing my fingers against my sternum.
“None of this happened by accident. It’s not some random idea I made up.
I saw it in my dream,” I went on, the words coming out quickly and evenly.
“I didn’t understand it then, but I do now.
And maybe it sounds stupid and impossible to you, but I know I’m meant to do this, and if I’m meant to do it then that means there has to be a way. ”
That shut him up for a second.
“What dream?” asked Dominic, climbing off the bed and slowly making his way to us as he smoothed his hand over his freshly pressed, black button-up shirt.