Page 207 of Ex Somnis

“That’s manipulation, Lenny.”

“No.” I keep my voice level. “Manipulation was you telling me to drive three thousand miles and come find you in a dream. This is me asking nicely.”

She looks at me, but her eyes go glassy while the corner of her mouth pulls, and I think she’s going to cry, yell, or both. “It won’t work,” she says instead. “Whatever it is, it won’t work.”

“It has to. But you have to play along for me.”

She swallows, then closes her eyes, and one by one, they arrive.

Derek first, stumbling out of nothing, but the second he sees her, he stops breathing in a way I can hear. Ridge effortlessly steps in after him, as if he had just used the door. Then Paul arrives and looks around the beach once, like he’s mapping it. His gaze catches on the doors immediately, but his expression doesn’t change. Which is how I know he hates it.

Paul only gets quiet when he’s afraid. His eyes find me, and I can tell he knows I am afraid, too, just as Nevan stumbles in, arms wheeling, landing hard on the sand with an ow. His gray eyes find mine instantly, like he had to check I was there before anything else.

I told Derek before we went under. I told him very clearly. “Whatever happens on that beach, you keep your mouth shut until I say otherwise.”

The idiot lasts about four seconds.

“I’m waiting here for you,” Derek says softly to her. “I’ll wait right here, and then we’re going to wake up again together.” He slowly crosses the sand to Tessa, as if she’s a deer that might bolt, and reaches out to take her hand. Both of mine clench, ready to peel him off her.

We’re so not going to risk the mission because he can’t stay away from her, but Tessa lets him.

She lets him take her hand, and she doesn’t pull away. Something in my chest cracks clean down the middle. Grief flickers across her face, as if she already knows what she’s about to lose, but Derek doesn’t move. Neither of them do.

Twelve years of waiting stretched thin between them, and I can see it.

She has never fully untethered from him.

Then she lets go of his hand and turns to me, composure snapping back up like a wall. She puts her chin up and breathes through her nose. “So, what now, Lenny?” she asks.

“We’re all going in there together.” I tip my head toward the door to elsewhere. “We’re all going to turn into you, and you need to act as normal but also as quiet as possible not to tick him off.”

“Turn into me? What…”

“Like this,” Ridge says, and on the next blink, Tessa’s face on Tessa’s body stands exactly where Ridge was, and it is so deeply, skin-crawlingly wrong that the real Tessa actually gasps.

“See?” Ridge says, in Tessa’s voice, which is even worse. “Your part is to stay quiet. And to wake up as soon as you can.”

“Why would he…” Tessa starts, but Paul and Nevan turn into her next, and the words die on her lips, replaced by an “Oh.”

For the first time since I got here, she looks scared.

I squeeze Tessa’s forearm before I turn into her, too, and now there are five of her, standing on a beach of closed doors under a healing, bruised sky.

And Derek, who looks like he’s going to be sick.

Hell, I’m going to be sick. I don’t have my own stomach right now, and I’m going to be sick anyway.

“Derek.” I point at him with a hand that’s wrong. “When she comes back out, you get her up to the surface. Understand? It doesn’t matter what else is happening. If she’s able to wake up, you guys do.”

He nods but looks like a man being asked to stay on the shore while everyone he loves rows out into a storm, which is almost what’s happening.

I lead us to the door that stands apart from the others, the only one the waves haven’t reached, dark wood, with the long flowing grain lines.

My stomach twists.

What if we walk through this thing and disappear?

What if this is the last time I ever see Derek standing on this beach?