A chemistry. A resonance. The particular phenomenon that occurs when two nervous systems share the same genetic architecture and have been calibrated against each other sincethe womb. It’s easiest to describe as the ability to distinguish between your own emotions and a set of foreign emotions thatagreewith you—that arrive in your awareness uninvited but not unwelcome, carrying the particular signature of a person whose emotional frequency is so close to yours that the signals overlap.
I feel his curiosity.
He feels my processing.
Neither of us mistakes the other’s feelings for our own.
But we feel them. Like temperature changes in an adjacent room. Like music playing through a shared wall.
That’s the easiest way to decipher it.
The closest language gets to describing something that language wasn’t designed to describe.
“Disappointed in Dominic’s brother,” I say.
The words emerge with the deliberate economy that characterizes my verbal output—stripped of the ornamental language Lucien would use, reduced to the structural essentials. Disappointed. Not furious. Not vengeful.Disappointed.Because fury and vengeance are Lucien’s territory—he processes betrayal through action and spectacle—while I process it through the quieter, more corrosive medium of understanding exactly how completely someone’s choices reflect their character, and finding the reflection inadequate.
“But,” I continue, and the conjunction signals the transition from the problem to the possibility, which is the transition that Lucien has been waiting for because he knows me well enough to know that I don’t dwell in disappointment without moving toward analysis, “I’m intrigued with this opportunity. With Victoria.”
I let the statement breathe.
The cold air carries it away from us in a small cloud of condensation that dissolves against the darkening sky.
“As for attractiveness.” I weigh the next words with the particular care of someone who is aware that his twin will weaponize any information provided and use it as ammunition for the kind of teasing that only siblings who share a face can deliver with maximum effectiveness. “She’s on a higher standard than the average Omega.”
I feel Lucien’s satisfaction through the twin frequency—a warm, smug pulse that radiates from his direction like heat from a lamp.
I continue before he can interrupt.
“She has a nice body. Curves where it matters. Long legs—dancer’s legs, specifically. The kind of muscle definition that comes from years of pointe work and discipline rather than aesthetic cultivation.” The assessment is clinical in delivery and not entirely clinical in origin, which is a discrepancy I choose not to examine. “But I don’t know if she’s going to survive the masquerade. If it’s going to be as bloody as I’m assuming.”
I let the caveat land.
“I guess our purpose is going to need to be protecting her in the process.”
The wordprotectingfeels strange in my mouth—not because the concept is foreign but because applying it to a woman whose qualifications include surviving four sectors of Knot Academy for a decade and being Violet Martinez’s pick for “most likely to survive a kill squad” seems both necessary and presumptuous. She doesn’t look like she needs protecting. She looks like she needs a reason to keep protecting herself, which is a fundamentally different kind of vulnerability and one I don’t have adequate protocols for.
Lucien sighs.
The exhale is theatrical—long, performatively burdened, carrying the particular tonal quality that my brother produces when he’s about to make a pop-cultural reference that heconsiders clever and that I consider evidence of too much unsupervised screen time during our teenage years.
“So we’re going to be her Tuxedo Masks, huh?”
I counter without hesitation.
“You realize half the time Sailor Moon didn’t need Tuxedo Mask.” My voice carries the flat certainty of someone delivering an evidence-based rebuttal to a flawed premise. “It was just to drag things out.”
Lucien laughs—the bright, genuine sound that fills the cold air between us and scatters against the manicured hedges like something warm thrown against something frozen.
“You fall asleep whenever we were forced to watch that shit.”
I shrug.
The gesture is minimal, precise—a micro-movement of shoulders beneath the charcoal wool that communicates complete indifference to the accusation while doing nothing to deny it.
“I listen with my ears and rest my eyes,” I say. “That’s all.”
A distinction that matters.
