Page 91 of Black Castle

“Nice to meet you, Lucan,” she says with a smile that Lucan is starting to find irritating. He just wants to leave here already and go back to her.

“Before we start, I’m not really sure I believe in this,” he says. “I am here only because I’m desperate, ready to try out anything.”

“It’s okay.” She folds her hands on her notepad. “You don’t have to believe it yet.”

“God, what am I doing here?” Lucan murmurs under his breath, unease weaving into his bones as his eyes sweep across the pristine and clean office for the hundredth time.

Sasha tilts her head to the side. “Yes, Lucan, what are you doing here?”

Silence stretches across them at her question, the answer sitting heavily on his chest. He can’t seem to bring himself to utter the words, not to a strange woman at least.

“You can trust me, Lucan,” she persuades. “Tell me why you are here. That’s the only way I can help you.”

The silence stretches further between them. There is no way uttering the words sitting on his tongue won’t make him sound vulnerable. And he hates being vulnerable in front of strangers.

“I don’t want him to hurt her,” he says, his voice low as he takes in a shaky breath. “I don’t want him to touch her too...ever again.”

“Her?” Sasha leans forward in the chair she’s sitting on, her elbows propped on her lap as she flattens her intertwined fingers under her chin. “Is this her someone important to you? Do you care a lot about her?”

“If I don’t care, will I be sitting here?” His tone raises higher than he intends, but softness settles in his eyes almost immediately, and he sighs heavily. “She has met him. She doesn’t like him…hopefully. I don’t know if she’s afraid of him or intrigued. Either way, I don’t want them to ever meet again. If she does…” His fingers tremble on his lap, and he clenches them shut to control it.

“You think you’ll lose her because of him?” she asks softly. “And you don’t want to lose her, right? Not to him, at least.”

“I feel like I could die.”

Lucan doesn’t know why he is unashamed as he says it, that too in front of a woman he is meeting for the first time. He searches the room, as if he will find a clue to why he’s telling a total stranger his darkest fear. Must be something she put in the air, he thinks.

“Zev is unpredictable,” he muses, his eyes settling on Sasha again.

“Is that his name?” she asks. “The other part of you?”

“How generous,” Lucan scoffs. “He is not the other part of me. He is in his own league. I am basically just his clean up crew.”

“How long have you been living with Zev?”

“Too long.” His eyes drop to his trembling hand. “I can’t remember. Could be as far as the day I was born. But he was quiet most of the time. Was silent. Then all of a sudden, he was loud. Too, too loud.”

“When exactly did he start talking?” she asks and Lucan raises a questioning brow. “I mean, what significant event occurred right before you started hearing his voice?”

Lucan’s fingers fiddle with the ring on his thumb, a flood of memory overwhelming him. “Ma was gone, our house was gone, I was hungry, cold…” He takes a long pause. “...and all I had was little Aiko.”

Though Aiko is a rascal now, a lost cause who is no longer so little, his sister will always be little Aiko.

“Little Aiko?” Sasha asks, while the echo of her pen against her notepad rings in the air.

“What are you writing, by the way?” He raises a suspicious brow at her.

“Nothing that should alarm you, Lucan.” She smiles reassuringly. “I’m just documenting our session.”

Lucan nods, but he isn’t sure he is comfortable with her writing what he is saying. She said he was safe here, didn’t she? Isn’t documentation a bit implicative?

“Little Aiko,” she echoes. “Who is that?”

“My little sister.”

“Okay.” She nods, then scribbles again. “Can you tell me how old little Aiko was when your Ma left?”

“You can just call her Aiko.” His tone is clipped, a little tension in his jaws. Sasha seems to notice as a common look flashes in her sharp blue eyes that seem to soften around the edges.

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