Page 217 of Ex Somnis

He’s grinning, and it is the most un-Tessa thing I have ever watched a Tessa do.

“That’s the rule, dickhead. A contract can’t undo a promise. And Lemon made me one first.” He flips Lucien off with a hand that’s still wearing Tessa’s pink nails.

Lucien released every promise ever made to him, and never once thought to ask about the ones I made to someone else. It never crossed his mind that the one that mattered was never his to take.

He yanks me by the hand closer to him, rattling me. “What did you promise?” He hisses, shaking me.

I only glare at him.

Every promise he ever collected, he took from people at their most vulnerable. Cornered Paul in his sleep. A frightened, fifteen-year-old Nevan. Tessa with her heart in pieces.

Every single one was pried out of somebody too scared to say no.

But the promise that just beat him, I gave away. Freely. Gladly.

Lucien never once learned what one is worth when it’s given.

He shakes me again. “Tell me!”

“She promised she’d never leave me again,” Nevan says, taking a step closer to us, his eyes only on me. “And I am never, ever releasing her from it.”

I can’t help but smile, pride and warmth bubbling up inside me at everything Nevan is.

I was never gettable, not for one second tonight. I walked up here ready to step into 5D forever for them, and I was never even able to.

I promised it to him.

I almost laugh.

I almost sob.

I do something useless in between that’s mostly air.

Ridge does laugh, though. He throws his head back and lets out that manic, delighted, completely unhinged laugh. “Goddammit, you’re a fucking genius, baby boy.”

Lucien drops my hand as if burned. He stands there in his circle of light, looking at his empty hands, and the hair on the back of my neck rises.

Shit.

A heartbeat later, he comes apart.

I have seen him be cruel. I have seen him patient, amused, and terrible, but I have never seen him like this. The façade of him cracking open, all of his control going at once. He spins and throws his hand toward Nevan-Tessa, and he is ripped off his feet, dragged backward through the air toward the door, suddenly, yawning open onto the black we came through.

“Nevan!” I yell too late.

He’s yeeted out of elsewhere, thrown out, and I won’t know until later whether that’s a mercy or the opposite.

Lucien turns on the rest of us.

“You think you won?” His voice is shaking now. “You think you’ve actually won something here?” A log comes down on Ridge. The exact tree I know from the inside of his nightmares. It pins him flat to the floor.

Ridge’s laugh chokes off into a grunt. Another gesture from Lucien, and Paul goes rigid where he stands, paralyzed, eyes wide and rolling, screaming behind closed lips.

Tessa, the real one, drops to her knees, shaking so hard she blurs at the edges.

“The only thing you’ve won,” Lucien says, advancing on me. “Is me, furious. You thought I was a monster before?”

“Lucien.”