Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Ridge
Thanks to the sap smell, the cold mud under my cheek, and the log across my back with the same weight distributed across the same two points that have been screaming at me since the last three times I bothered to close my eyes, I’m very fucking aware that I’m dreaming.
I have known what this is after maybe thirty seconds of being here, which is the small and only mercy of being a lucid dreamer with a recurring nightmare.
The moment of arrival, where the architecture clicks in, the rational part of my brain catches up with the panicking part, and says, “Right, this again.” Then it sits very still and waits for the panicking part to stop trying to crawl out of the situation through sheer adrenaline.
It takes varying amounts of time depending on how much actual sleep I got before I ended up here.
Tonight I’m estimating forty minutes. So… yeah, not great.
The pain doesn’t care that I know this. That’s the thing about reliving the worst moment of your life inside your subconscious. It is committed to the bit with a professionalism I have to reluctantly admire. The weight is real. The two vertebrae that changed everything are real.
In waking life, I don’t have sensation below a certain line.
In here, I have all of it.
The whole archived record, full volume.
Sweetheart, I think, past the pain, the smell of sap, cold mud, and the sound of absolutely nothing moving in this fucking forest.
What the fuck did you do?
Three days.
Three days on top of a hundred, of closing my eyes and ending up here again, every time, pinned under several thousand pounds of wood that keeps me efficiently occupied and away from anywhere useful.
Three days of trying to push past the edge of this nightmare and finding the same wall.
It’s starting to feel less like a boundary and more like a very personal fuck you.
I can’t get to her kitchen, can’t get to Tessa’s beach, or anything that isn’t this stretch of forest, this log, this fucking inventory of everything I’ve mishandled.
He’s thorough. I’ll give him that.
I’d give him quite a lot, actually.
I have a list.
Alphabetized. Frequently updated.
But there’s been a pull the entire time I’ve been pinned here, this directional thing in the center of my chest. It pulls in a direction, the way you know which way is up even with your eyes closed, underwater, or in a forest that has swallowed the sky and has no exits. Something in me knows she’s somewhere.
Just somewhere.
Somewhere is the least useful word I know.
I put my forehead in the mud and take a personal inventory of everyone I’m angry at, because if I’m going to be held here, I’m at least going to be productive about something.
Nevan.
Baby boy, six feet seven inches of freckled sincerity and catastrophically bad timing, and the emotional restraint of a Labrador with a crush, who decided the precise moment to act on whatever he’d been carrying was at his birthday party.
He kissed her, and the universe’s response to that was to misplace her entirely.
I’m choosing not to examine my feelings about the kissing or the fact that he kissed her before I did because there are several more important things on the list.
Derek.
He was right there, and she basically told him what she was about to do, but he didn’t understand the gravity of it and let her walk out, which is impressive because I know she wasn’t subtle about it. Lennon has never been subtle about anything.
Mrs. Vaughn and the fucking Vaughn mansion.
The fact that Lennon is in it, and I cannot simply go there, not only because the logistics of the building are what they are, but because that woman did enough to Derek for long enough that setting foot in her house on a favor is a kind of swallowing that I haven’t managed yet.
And I have swallowed some deeply questionable things in the name of necessity.
Paul, whom I’ve called twenty-seven times in three days. Twenty-seven.
And he’s picked up exactly two times.
When Lennon wasn’t at her apartment, I’d swallowed my pride and called Paul. He’d picked up and told me what he’d found when he had gotten there. After that, he didn’t pick up until tonight, when he told me she was still asleep.
I hate the fact that he has her right in front of him, and I don’t.
And the fact that he apparently thinks he’s dating her.
Which. Fine. She went on a date with him. I’m not doing anything with my feelings about that right now either. There’s a queue. I’ll get to it.
And yeah, Paul Bennett has been watching over her for the past three days, but he has absolutely no idea. About her kitchen, and the nights I spent in her dreamscape. What we built there, what she let me build. About the deal we made, and the night we shared the lollipop…
About how my chest feels when she looks at me.
About any of it.
He has no idea she is mine.
My tether.
That brings me to the next person I’m angry at.
Tessa-fucking-Vaughn.
Who may have gotten what she wanted. Thinking that is uncharitable, but I’m choosing it anyway, because the alternative is sitting with the version where Tessa had no control, where This Man used her completely. She was as much a casualty as anyone else.
Both options are bad. One is easier to be angry at.
What is true, though, is that I’m fucking furious with Lennon.
Which is irritating in its own way.
I know she must have panicked. She probably looked at what was happening to Tessa’s body and thought she could fix it by sacrificing herself. It is the most Lennon thing she could have done. I can’t even be surprised by it, but somehow that makes the fury worse.
“Sweetheart,” I say it out loud this time, my voice rougher than I planned. “What the fuck did you do?”
The forest doesn’t answer, and the pull in my chest does its thing again.
Directional. Useless.
I have been patient. I’ve been, by my standards, extraordinarily patient. I have lain here night after night after night, tried to work around the edges of this trap, and gotten exactly nowhere.
I understand what that means.
He is keeping me still the same way he kept me still before Lennon freed me from my mind. He boxed me in, too occupied with the nightmare to build past it, but I am done with waiting for an opening that isn’t going to come on its own.
I tilt my head back as far as the compression across my spine will allow.
“Come on.” My voice cracks, and I’m blaming it on the mud.
I pull in as much air as I have access to right now, and I aim it at the dark, at the edges of the forest.
“Show yourself, you fucking coward!”
The forest doesn’t respond.
That’s fine.
I have more.
“What, no dramatic entrance? Bit of thunder, maybe? You’ve had three days to workshop it. Are you scared?” I try to shift my weight, and the pain whitens out.
Fuck.
“Can’t manage it?” I grit out. “Where are you? You stole her from me, and you haven’t even had the decency to show your face. Very disappointing. I expected more from the man who keeps me in my nightmares like a pet.”
Breathe in through the nose.
“Come on, you dickhead, I want to…”
He appears in the space between one breath and the next, startling me into silence.
No footsteps, he’s just there, crouched right in front of me, close enough that I get the full effect of that face, the green eyes, the wrongness, and I flinch.
I hate it, but it’s involuntary and therefore not my fault.
“Ridge Wells.” His voice is almost pleasant. “Don’t you get tired of your voice? I certainly do.” He tilts his head. “You’ve been very noisy.”
“And you’ve been keeping her from me. Where is she?”
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?” He huffs, almost amused.
Everyone?
Paul, probably, or Nevan, maybe, who I’m not sure is even aware of what’s going on in his mind at night, but I don’t know what the three days since she left all of us have done to him.
“Where. Is. She?”
“You know,” he starts, and I grind my teeth hard enough to feel it in my jaw. “You guys don’t realize that she is having a good time. The best, really. She’s enjoying herself.”
“I don’t give a fuck what you think she is feeling. Let her go.”
He chuckles. The sound is almost warm, which is the worst thing about him.
Nothing he does sounds like what it is.
“Don’t you get it? I am not holding her hostage. She let go. She let go of you.”
Something happens in my chest that I’m not going to name right now. Later, in the dark, with no one watching, I’ll name it, but right now I keep my face exactly where I need it to be, a skill I am suddenly very grateful for.
“I swear I’m going to kill you for taking her from me.”
I hear myself say it out loud, and I know it’s true.
She matters to me. I knew that.
But I didn’t know I would kill for her.
That’s new.
Noted.
“Maybe the threat wouldn’t be so hollow if I hadn’t pinned you under a log, don’t you think?
” A small laugh huffs out of him, and it makes me even angrier.
“Again, I did not take her. I simply kept the door open.” He spreads his hands, unhurried as everything else about him. “I didn’t push her through it.”
Stupid. Beautiful. Stubborn woman.
“Only because of Tessa.” My anger is useful right now, and I’m leaning into it hard. “Because of everything that woman did to Derek, because Tessa got stuck in your—”
“I’m keeping my word,” he cuts me off, and something about his tone shuts the rest of the sentence in my mouth.
“Tessa has Lennon. That gives me what I asked for. You’ll have your monsters back.
Dr. Bennett has his nights back, and the boy his dreams.” He leans even closer to me, so close that his breath brushes against my sweat-damp skin. “All you have to do is keep away.”
His hand comes under my jaw, takes hold, and pulls. The angle is wrong for everything my back is already doing, and I make a sound I’m not proud of. It’s something between a snarl and a hiss, because it hurts, fuck, does it hurt, and he holds it until I’m looking at him, whether I want to or not.
“Get your dirty hands off me,” I grit out.
“Promise me to keep away from Lennon.”