He Loved Her Like a Threat

Chapter Two: Curiosity Is Just Obsession Wearing Better Clothes

"Goodnight, Lucien."

She hung up before he could answer.

The apartment was quiet. Too quiet infact. Aria dropped onto the couch and stared at the ceiling, phone resting on her chest, his voice still echoing somewhere it had no business being.

Your poem was dishonest.

You spoke about power like you've never wanted it.

She felt really troubled amidst hating that he was right. She hated it more than she wanted to admit.

"God, I hate mysterious men," she said to no one.

By 3 a.m. she'd given up pretending she was going to sleep. She picked up the phone, opened a search engine, and typed his name.

Lucien Vale.

Articles loaded instantly. Acquisitions and revenue figures popped up. Panel appearances in rooms that cost more per night than her monthly rent. She scrolled through all of it and somehow found nothing. She could not find a real person; only a carefully assembled version of one. Every interview gave answers that revealed exactly nothing. Every profile told the story of a company, never a man. Which made no sense. Because twenty minutes ago, on the phone, he had handed her SOMETIMES like it cost him nothing. He had said HONESTY COSTS ME LESS THAN IT COSTS MOST PEOPLE like it was just a fact about the weather. Men who said things like that didn't disappear from their own coverage by accident.

She found a recorded interview eventually. It was forty-three minutes long. She told herself she would watch five minutes, just to get a feel of him in a room. She watched all forty-three.

For most of it, he was exactly what she expected. He seemed composed, patient, redirecting every question that got too personal with so much ease. It kind of felt like he had been doing it for years. Controlled. You couldn't read if he was even hiding something.

Then the interviewer asked about a mentor. Someone who had died.

And for one second. Barely a second if you must know critically. Something crossed his face that wasn't practiced and performed. It was there and gone before the next question started, it was small and fast, like he had forgotten the camera existed.

Aria sat up straight.

There.That was it. The c***k she'd been looking for. Even though it had disappeared almost before she had seen it. Her phone buzzed.

Still awake?

She went still.

Two words. No apology for the hour. No explanation. Just a question sitting on her screen like it already knew the answer. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. She locked the phone instead. Walked to the window. She then pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and told herself to breathe. It didn't help. Because nothing about it felt accidental. Not the texts. Not the call. Not this message arriving exactly when she had just found the one c***k in his armor he had never meant to show anyone. Her phone made another sound.

She looked down.

Not a new message.

A read receipt sat beneath his text.

Seen.

Aria frowned.

That wasn't possible. She hadn't opened anything neither had she touched the screen since the last time she locked it. There was no way. There was just no logical, reasonable and explainable way that word should be there.

Yet Aria stood at the window for a long moment, the city spreading out below her, indifferent and glittering yet again. It seemed entirely unbothered by the fact that her night had just rearranged itself around a man she just met three hours ago. She thought about the c***k in the interview. The mentor he had never named. The practiced calm that had slipped for less than a second and then locked itself back into place.

Then she picked up the phone and typed before she could stop herself.

Who was he? The mentor.

She stared at what she'd written.

Deleted it and typed it again. Deleted it again.

"You don't know this man," she said out loud, to herself, firmly, like that might actually work. It didn't work.

She sat back down on the couch, pulled her knees up, and opened the interview again instead. She jumped straight to the moment, the one second, watched it three more times trying to name what she had seen in his face. She wouldn't call it grief exactly. She recognized it. She'd written about it once, in a poem she had never meant anyone to read; about a man who'd shaped the way she saw the world and then left it in a way that made the world feel smaller. Still she couldn't name it.

Her phone lit up one more time.

You should sleep, Aria.

She stared at the message.

He hadn't asked if she was awake again.

He spoke with certainty like he was with binoculars watching her from a distance. She turned the phone face-down on the cushion beside her.

She did not sleep for a very long time.