Chapter 34
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Lennon
I close my eyes, bracing for forever.
I wait for the part where I stop being mine and start being his, but it doesn’t come. His hand is in mine, and we’re shaking. Up, down. And there’s nothing. No heat. No click or lock. Just two hands moving in the cold, like strangers who’ve made a deal about a used car.
My eyes fly open.
The honey is gone. The liquid gold I had Paul, Ridge, and Tessa pinned in, not there anymore, slipped loose the second I stopped holding myself together to brace for him. Ridge’s shadow has bled back into regular dark. The vines lashing Nevan have gone slack, crumbling into nothing.
Not one of us has a scrap of focus left to keep a single thing standing, not through watching this not take.
We’re all scattered around a bare circle of light.
Lucien stares at our joined hands in disbelief. He shakes again. Harder. Then watches my face when he shakes a third time, his grip tightening enough to hurt.
“Why isn’t it working?”
“I don’t know.” It’s the easiest lie I have ever told, because I’m not certain either, not really. I only hoped…
“What did you do?” He’s not asking anymore. He pumps my hand again, furious now. “I know your soul, and you know exactly who I am. You agreed to it. You let go. Why won’t it work?”
“Because you can’t override a promise with a soul contract.”
The voice comes from behind me. Impossibly, he’s still wearing Tessa’s face, but his expression has absolutely none of Tessa’s restraint.
Nevan.
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 facade 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.”
“No one will ever rest in their sleep again. Not one of them. I will be in every dream any of you ever have. I will walk them to the edges of high places and let go. I will put them back in the worst nights of their lives and lock the door. I will sit with them while they break. Over. And over. And over.” His eyes are wet and completely mad.
“I will make their nights hell so their days turn into nightmares. You wanted to take everyone’s pain onto yourself, Lenny?
Fine. I’ll give it back to each of them, personally, forever. ”
Behind me, the door creaks open again. Nevan-Tessa has made it back into elsewhere, but before I can see if he’s all right, Lucien grabs my chin and yanks my face back to his.
“You don’t know what fear is, Lennon Maes.
” His thumb digs into my jaw. “Do you understand that? You’ve only ever been afraid for people.
For your mother. For your friend. For these men.
You have never once, in your whole martyred little life, been afraid for yourself.
” He leans in closer, his lips brushing my ear.
“I’m going to fix that. I’m going to take them away from you one nightmare at a time, until there’s no one left to be afraid for.
Until it’s just you. Alone. And then, you’ll learn it. ”
And he lets go, not just of me but all of us. The log lifts off Ridge. Paul gasps and folds as the paralysis breaks. Tessa stands on trembling legs.
We need to get the fuck out of here.
“How about we start the nightmare now?” Lucien asks, tilting his head.
I’m about to yell at them to leave, but Ridge surges up onto his feet, and Lucien shoves me hard, right into Ridge, and we go down in a tangle with an oof that would be funny in any other life, in any other dimension, on any other night.
Before I even catch my next breath, I’m already past it, thinking ahead, the same way my mind narrows when I think the kitchen is on fire.
Get up, get them up, get out, wake up, regroup, make a new plan before anyone has to close their eyes again.
“Stop.” A voice cuts clean through the noise in my head.
Tessa.
She steps forward into the circle of light. Past me, past Ridge, out into the open space between Lucien and the rest of us, her chin held high. “I choose you. If you still want me.”
What?
No. I did not crawl through all of this. I didn’t drive across a country, walk into the dark, prepare to sacrifice myself three times already, only for her to end up right back where she was.
But then she looks at me, and it’s so full of love that my breath catches. It’s a look like a palm laid against my cheek. Like a goodbye that made its peace long ago.
It’s all right, the look says. Let me.
The hell I will.
The rage drains out of Lucien’s face all at once, and something else floods in to replace it, stunned and almost young, as he stares at her like the floor opened up. “Of course, I still want you,” he whispers, almost reverent.
“No!” I scramble up off Ridge, clawing at the floor, at the cold, at anything. “No, Tessa.”
Arms band around me from behind and haul me back against a chest.
“Shh.” Ridge shushes against my ear, holding me with everything he’s got. “Shh, Blondie. Don’t.”
“Let me go!” I fight him, claw at his arms to get to her in time, even bite into his forearm, but Ridge doesn’t let go. I throw my weight, try to get my feet under me, anything to reach her before she can do what she’s about to do. “Ridge, that’s my… let me go. I have to…”
He doesn’t let go.
He holds me, and over his arm, I watch my best friend lift her hand toward the monster of her story.
Lucien looks at her like she’s the only real thing in any world there has ever been.
“It’s you,” he breathes out.
“It’s me,” she agrees softly.
He reaches out and takes her hand, and the smile that breaks across his face is one I have never seen on him. Tessa is smiling, too, like this is the easiest thing she’s ever done, and I’m screaming her name until my throat tears.
They shake, and I feel it, even from here. Even held back and screaming, I feel it go through the whole room. The lock. The final click of something sealing all the way down. The exact thing I braced for with my hand a minute ago and never got.
Tessa doesn’t love him. Tessa loves Derek. She loves the life she hasn’t gotten to live yet. This can’t be happening.
Light.
Everywhere.
A soundless slam of it, and the black floor drops away as all of us are ripped out of elsewhere, and I hit sand.
Soft sand, warm under my hands, a bruise-colored sky, and a thousand colored doors standing closed along the waterline.
The beach.
Tessa’s beach.
A sob breaks out of me.
I’m sprawled half in Ridge’s lap and up before I’ve finished landing, on my feet, soaked through with tears. I run back toward the doors, to the one that stands a little to the side, to go back in, to drag her out, because I am not, I am not leaving her there.
Ridge starts to laugh, and I round on him. He’s sitting in the sand grinning up at me like a lunatic, and I could kill him. I could actually kill him right now.
“What is funny?” My voice tears. “Why do you think that’s funny, Ridge? How could you hold me back? You promised.”
“Sweetheart.” He’s still laughing, but his eyes are wet too. “Look around.”
I look around.
Nevan-Tessa is standing a few feet away in the sand, looking deeply confused.
On the ground in front of him, unconscious, is another Tessa.
The standing one stares down at the unconscious one with his mouth open.
“What?” Nevan-Tessa asks in his own voice. “What the fuck is happening? This Man threw me out, and I landed here. Then another Tessa walked past me and went in through the door. I tried to follow her to get back in, too, but she wouldn’t let me.”
Ridge climbs to his feet and rushes to the unconscious Tessa on the ground. He crouches down beside her, then he glances up at where Derek is standing, white-faced.
Tears are still streaming down my face, but the desperation is tempered by confusion now.
“What the hell is going on?” I look at Paul, who shakes his head.
“Derek, get over here. Help me sit her up.” Derek hurries to Ridge, and they prop the unconscious Tessa between them.
Derek gently brushes a strand of hair off her pretty, slack face.
“This is the real Tessa,” Ridge murmurs.
What?
As if she heard her name, she groans, and her eyes crack open. The second they meet, I know he’s right.
“How?” I gasp out. Her eyes flutter shut, then Tessa’s whole body flickers, there and not there, like a signal going out.
Is she locked in the in-between again?
I drop to my knees in front of her. “What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s waking up,” Paul says, looking at all of us. “Everyone, brace yourselves. We’re about to get kicked out of this dream in about thirty seconds.”
Derek makes a sound like he’s been hit. “Angel.”
Ridge grips his shoulder. “Go. Wake up. Be the first thing she sees when she actually opens her eyes.”
Derek nods, eyes glassy, then grabs Ridge and pulls him in for a fast, crushing hug. In the next blink, he disappears.
I gather Tessa’s flickering shape into my arms and hold on. She’s barely solid. Cocoa butter and salt, fading in and out against me, and I press my face to the top of her head. I don’t let go even though there’s less and less to hold.
“You made it,” I whisper. “You made it out, girl. I told you. I promised you that you would.”
Paul sinks onto the sand beside us, studying Tessa in my arms, then looks over his shoulder at the row of closed doors, landing on the darker one that’s shut again.
“If this is Tessa,” Paul says slowly. “Then who…”
The beach folds in on itself before he can finish.