Page 213 of Ex Somnis

My stomach drops.

No.

No, no, no.

Paul isn’t trying to stop him.

Paul is trying to replace me.

The arm around me locks rigid when Ridge murmurs. “Oh, no you don’t.”

Lucien tilts his head inside the cage of vines and chuckles. “I really don’t long for an eternity with you, Dr. Bennett.”

Then it can’t work, right?

Seraphine said the souls have to recognize themselves.

Isn’t a contract based on consent?

“Pity,” Paul says. “You’ll have to take it anyway. Like I had to take five years of you.”

The vines move, dragging Lucien’s right arm up slowly, forcing his hand out flat into the empty air between them, palm open, for a handshake he is not agreeing to.

Paul lifts his hand to meet it. “You started something tonight, so finish it with me. I know what you are. You know what I am. That’s enough to bind, so shake on it, and let them go.”

“Paul!” I throw my whole body against the plant around my waist, but it doesn’t give an inch. “Paul, nooo!”

I twist wildly in Ridge’s arms, and that’s when I see the rest of them. Two Tessas, off to the side, both lashed flat against nothing by Paul’s vines the same way Ridge and I are. The real Tessa and the Nevan one beside her, white-knuckling even now. Paul tied us all down, every one of us. So none of us could do exactly what I am trying to do.

He made up his mind to be the one who pays, and he made sure no one could stop him first.

When Paul’s hand is an inch from Lucien’s, the vines around my body rip apart. I turn to find Tessa’s face dropping off Ridge, his real shape tearing up through hers, dark, furious, and very much Ridge.

The dark behind him peels. It comes off the black in long sheets, the way his monsters always come, shadows with too many edges. He hurls it across the light toward Paul. It hits him in the side and slams him back, off Lucien.

“You,” Ridge snarls out at Paul. “Do not get to sacrifice yourself for me. Again. You selfless-fucking-idiot.”

“Ridge—” I start, but he cuts me off with a kiss.

“I made you a promise.” His hand grips my hair, and he catches my bottom lip in his teeth and bites, enough to make me gasp, and I’ll feel it after. “I promised I’d help you get Tessa back. I keep my promises, sweetheart. Even without the dream logic.”

“Ridge.”

“And.” That crooked, terrible, one-sided smile blooms on his lips. “I promised the bastard that I’d kick his ass.”

“Don’t.”

“I love you more than my life.”

Then the darkness comes out of him.

It pours off Ridge all at once, off his shoulders, his hands, the air around him, and half of it slams into Lucien, wraps him, floods over Paul’s vines until he’s bound twice, plant and shadow, a man caught in two different nightmares at the same time.

The other half catches Paul.

It pins him back against nothing, a foot off the floor, and Ridge is already rounding on him.

“You and I are going to have a conversation about your fucking martyr complex.”