Page 171 of In Somnis

“I don’t want anything from her.”

What the hell?

“And what does the Shaw boy have to do with any of this?”

“Oh, he and I go way back.” He looks at Nevan, then back at me, and a small, private smile curls at his lips. “But that would be, once again, my business and not yours.” He takes a step closer, and it costs me more willpower than I’d like to admit not to back away. “Let me make you an offer, Ridge Wells. If you take it, everyone gets what they want.”

“And what is it that you want?”

“I don’t want much. Just what is mine. Tessa.” His smirk widens. “But Tessa wants Lennon.”

My jaw tightens with the effort of not telling him to fuck right off.

“And I know what you want, too, Ridge. You want me to leave Paul alone. To leave you alone.” His gaze slides back to Nevan. “And I’ll give you one more, since it looks like you have a soft spot for him…” He pauses, letting it sink in. “Leave Tessa alone. Leave Lennon alone.”

“I…”

“Don’t be in my way. Keep your hands and the good doctor’s hands, off both of them so Tessa gets what she needs to give me what I need, and you’ll never see me again. Never feel me again.” He leans in close enough that I can smell the wrongness underneath his presence—stale air and endings. “You’ll have your subconscious back. I’ll let you build your cute little monsters again.”

The classroom floods with darkness.

Creatures materialize instantly, things with too many limbs, shadows that breathe, and walls that scream. My monsters. But this kind of nightmare architecture takes me seconds of focused effort to build, and he conjures it all in a blink. No concentration. No strain. Just will made manifest.

Holy shit.

Then, before the darkness swallows everything, he leans back, and it’s gone.

All of it. Clean white walls and fluorescent lights again, as though it never existed.

Maybe he’s not real after all. Maybe Paul is right, and he is a shared psychosis, a tulpa given form, that shouldn’t be possible. Because no person, no matter how skilled, should be able to wield dreams like this. Keep others hostage in their own nightmares. Strip away someone’s ability to build in their own subconscious.

“Leave the women alone, Wells.” He steps back, hands sliding into his pockets. “And it will be like you never knew me.”

The air folds, and he’s gone.

Fuck, that guy is unsettling.

Leave her alone. Get my life back.

I stand there and let myself feel the full weight of it, because it deserves that much honesty at least. My dreams. My career. Paul. The things I’ve spent five years grieving without letting myself call it grief because that would require admitting how much I lost when I lost him. All of it, handed back. No more waking up with someone else’s terror soaked into my skin. No more lying in the dark listening to a woman cry through a wall and doing nothing about it because doing something about it would mean admitting I care, and caring is the thing I’ve been very carefully not doing.

It would be so easy.

That’s the part that makes my skin crawl. How easy it would be. How much I want it. I want my subconscious back so badly I can taste it, and the fact that he knew exactly what to offer. He reached into me and pulled out the precise shape of everything I’ve been missing and laid it on the table like it was nothing.

He knows.

He knows what I want, what Paul wants, and what Nevan is most afraid of, apparently, and has known it long enough to build a whole nightmare around it. He knows Tessa, what she needs, and what to do with that need to serve himself. He knows everything about everyone in this, and he walked in here calm and handsome, offering me a clean exit like a man who has never once been told no.

Which means he’s been watching, building a picture of all of us with the patience of something that has nowhere else to be.

My jaw aches from clenching it.

The worst part, the part I have to stand here and admit to myself in a dream classroom at whatever this hour is, is that I almost want to take it. Not because I don’t care what happens to Lennon, or even Tessa, but because I’m tired. Bone tired of waking up in the forest and reliving my own nightmare, or lying awake in the dark and being alone with all of it.

I want to be done.

And he knows that too. Of course, he does.