Page 63 of Ex Somnis

“You seem unsettled,” Lucien says softly.

Unsettled. Right. Casual word for whatever the fuck this is.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re lying.” He offers me his arm. “Lenny.”

“Don’t call me that.” I walk past him.

He falls into step beside me, unhurried, matching my stride with his way-longer legs. “I thought we had a nice day. A good conversation.”

“That was before I came to my senses.”

“Ah.” He glances down at me with a smirk. “So that’s what this is.”

“Yeah, that’s what this is. Sorry, I know you like the people around you rather mindless.”

“And here I thought you were sweet,” he says teasingly. Why the hell is This Man teasing me? “Looks like there’s some bite to the sugar.”

“Better get used to it for the amount of time I’m staying here.”

“I think I’m going to enjoy this,” he mutters, mostly to himself.

I glare at him, but he looks amused, hands loosely in his pockets as he falls into step beside me again like we’re on a nice little garden stroll and not having the world’s weirdest hostage negotiation.

“Start talking,” I say. “Or I go back to Tessa.”

His mouth twitches.

“And for the record,” I continue. “Tessa is still in love with someone else.”

That finally sobers him up.

“She’s here because she thinks she can’t have him,” I bait. “But she can. He’s waiting for her. He’s literally been waiting for her for twelve years.”

Lucien stays quiet as the gravel keeps crunching under our feet.

“You can’t seriously not know about him,” I scoff. “The way you know everything else about everyone.”

“I know of him.”

Oh?

“Then why are you even doing this?” I stop walking and fully turn toward him now, frustrated enough that it spills out before I can filter it. “Why would you want someone who loves someone else?”

He looks ahead instead of at me as we start walking again.

“There was a woman,” he says eventually. “Before Tessa.”

“That feels ominous already.”

He ignores that.

“She was everything I’d been looking for, quite literally, in this case. Kind but not soft. Smart. Interested in what interested me and equally fierce about things of her own. She knew this space the way very few people do.”

There’s something strange about hearing someone like him sound human.

Not less frightening.