Page 192 of In Somnis

For one fractured second, my face is buried against him. Ginger. Sugar. The sour citrus of that stupid lollipop.

Then the street erupts⁠—

I wake up in my bedroom, my heart slamming hard enough that I feel it in my throat.

I lie there and stare into the darkness.

Tessa’s face across the threshold.

My mother’s hand reaching.

Ridge’s arms around me, his smell of ginger and sugar. The city erupting behind him.

From the other side of the wall comes only silence.

I press both hands over my face and stay there until my heart decides to behave, which takes longer than I’d like.

Let go, Lenny. Stay with us.

I think about my mom’s smile, about how it felt to take that step toward her.

How close I came.

The anger comes back before I can stop it, and I let it because it’s cleaner than the alternative, and right now, clean is what I need.

I sit up, and before I can think too much about it, I stand and find my cardigan on the floor. I pull it on over my sleep shirt, then shove my feet into my shoes without looking at them.

That’s it.

I’m getting Tessa out.

I don’t know what it costs, what Ridge knows that he hasn’t told me, what This Man wants, or what letting go actually means when it’s the only person who ever…

I’m getting her out.

Even if I have to learn an entirely new language of dreaming to do it.

Even if it costs me whatever version of denial I’ve been living on.

I’m already in the hallway before the thought fully finishes forming, my apartment door clicking shut behind me. The building is quiet, and I’m moving on something that isn’t quite a thought yet, just direction, the furious forward momentum that makes me set one foot in front of the other.

I check the small plaque beside the doorbell. Wells.

Then I knock three times. Not soft.

There’s a pause long enough that I almost knock again, but then the door opens to disheveled dark hair sticking in several directions, a crease on his cheek from a pillow, and tired dark eyes blinking down at me.

“Lennon?”

He looks at me, then down the hallway, then back at me.

“Everything okay?”

I take a deep breath.

“We need to talk, Derek.”

CHAPTER THIRTY