Page 104 of Level Up for Love

Chapter

Twenty-Nine

Less than a minute after I send the text, there’s a soft knock at my door.

I swallow. He must have been waiting for me to message—there’s no other explanation.

Wesley steps quietly into the room, and with his thick flannel pajama pants, Game Knight pullover, and mussed hair, he looks adorably sleepy—but his dark eyes are alert and a little wary. Neither of us has slept yet, I’d bet on it.

I pull aside the comforter, and he crawls in. We both lie on our sides, staring at each other, not touching.

“That was incredible,” I say.

He exhales a quiet laugh. “Did you really ask me to come to your room at two a.m. to tell me that?”

“So what if I did?”

“Maybe I wish you had other things in mind.”

“I can contain multitudes, Wesley.”

He sneaks his hand closer to me and lays it flat on the gray sheets in the space between us. I fold my fingers over his. He relaxes some.

“Do we really have to kill him?” I ask.

“Vadrien?”

“Obviously.”

He tilts his head from side to side. “Probably.”

“He’s so well done. I don’t want to kill him; it’s like—I want to help.”

“That’s the tragedy of him, isn’t it?” Wesley muses. “In some ways, he just wanted to survive and fix his kingdom. But the pact he made and the power he gained corrupted him irreversibly.”

I pick at a loose thread on my pillow. “Irreversibly?”

His gaze is steady on me, but I watch the dimple on his cheek pop in and out of existence. “Yes,” he says.

I press my lips together.

He curls his fingers against my ribs playfully. “This is textbook lore, Reagan. You know this,” he teases. “Vampires are inherently evil creatures. Whatever humanity he had is gone now. Some would argue he doesn’t have a soul anymore at all.”

I pin him with a flat look. My tone sounds like an eye roll. “The whole point of Blood Pact is to see whether the player, as Vadrien, can resist succumbing to monstrous tendencies. The fact that it’s a fight at all implies that it’s possible for him to overcome them.”

“Does it?” His eyes gleam in the darkness. “You don’t know how it ends.”

But I’m already shaking my head. “Neither do you,” I accuse. “Determining the ending this far ahead goes against your gaming philosophy.”

Wesley draws back in surprise; a puzzled smile curls his lips. “What do you know about my gaming philosophy?”

Everything, I think. Because it’s the same as mine.

“I’ve watched how you play, Wesley—how you create, how you DM. I think, for you, the beauty of games—good games—is that the player has a hand in how the story shapes out. It’s not some predetermined thing, the way it is in a book or a movie. In D&D, or in a video game, the players get to make choices that affect the course of their adventure. And I think you respect that agency too much to have already decided Vadrien’s fate.”

Gently, Wesley traces a knuckle down the side of my face. “You do pay attention, don’t you?”

“To you? Always.”