POV: Seren Adaeze
The bag is not cooperating.
I shove the shirt in for the fifth time and it still won't lie flat, and Dami is sitting on my bed watching me like I'm an exhibit at a zoo, and I need her to stop looking at me like that because I can feel what she's about to say building in the room like pressure before rain.
"You like him," she says.
"I'm packing."
"You folded that shirt four times."
"Five," I say, then hate myself for correcting her.
She pulls her knees up to her chest and doesn't say anything else. That's worse. Dami's silence has weight to it. It sits in the room and takes up space and makes you want to fill it just to get some relief.
"I don't know him," I say. "You can't like someone you don't know."
"You know enough to follow him to an island that doesn't exist on any map."
I zip the bag. It's not properly packed but I zip it anyway because I need to do something with my hands. Outside the window the city is doing its usual nighttime noise and it feels strange that it sounds normal, that nothing out there has changed, that I am standing in my bedroom about to go somewhere I have no name for with a man who told me to trust him and gave me no real reason why.
"What did he say exactly?" Dami asks.
"I told you what he said."
"Tell me again."
I sit on the edge of the bed. The bag is between us like a thing neither of us wants to look at directly. "He said there are things on the island I need to see, that it was important I come now and not later." I pause. "He said later might be too late."
Dami's face does something careful. "Too late for what?"
"He didn't say."
She looks at the bag. I look at the wall. The silence comes back.
The thing I won't tell her is that when Lucian said those words, later might be too late, his voice did not sound like a warning. It sounded like something else, like a person saying something they had been holding for a long time and were only now letting go of. And that is not a reason to trust someone. I know that. I know it completely. But I keep turning it over in my head like a coin, heads and tails, heads and tails, trying to figure out what it means.
"You'll call me," Dami says. It isn't a question.
"If I can get a signal."
"Seren."
"I'll call you."
She hugs me at the door and holds on a second longer than usual and I let her because I don't know what to say that would make either of us feel better. Then she leaves and the flat is very quiet and I go to bed without eating because my stomach won't settle.
I don't expect to sleep. I lie there staring at the ceiling counting the things I don't know about this man, which takes a long time, and somewhere in the middle of the list I must have gone under because I'm somewhere else.
The island.
I know it's the island before I can see it properly. There's a smell first, salt and something green and underneath it something older that I don't have a word for. Then the shore comes up around me, pale sand and dark water and a sky that is just starting to go light at the edges, not quite morning, not still night.
Lucian is standing at the water's edge.
He doesn't turn around when I get close, but I know he knows I'm there. His shoulders shift slightly, the way a person does when they stop being alone and feel it.
"You came," he says.
I stop a few feet behind him. The water is very still. "It's a dream," I say.
"Yes."
Something about the way he says it makes me walk up beside him instead of staying back. He looks the way he always looks, like someone who has learned to hold still when everything in him wants to move. But his eyes, when he turns them toward me, are sad in a way I wasn't prepared for, not just tired, sad in the way something is sad when it has been true for a very long time.
"I just wish you didn't have to," he says.
I open my mouth. I don't know what I was going to say, maybe nothing, maybe I was just going to make a sound to fill the space his words left behind.
But then something shifts in the dream. The water changes. The stillness breaks and there is something moving under the surface, too large to be a fish, too deliberate to be a current, and Lucian steps slightly in front of me without seeming to think about it. The gesture was small, automatic, like he had done it before, like he had done it many times for me specifically.
That's the moment I understand something that wakes me up.
He has been here before, this dream, this shore, this exact moment. He has been here and he knows what comes next and whatever it is, he stepped between me and it anyway.
I sit up in the dark. My heart is going too fast. The bag is by the door where I left it, waiting.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
A message from a number I don't recognise, no name, just six words and a set of coordinates.
Don't come tomorrow, He's not safe.