Elowen had stopped pretending Lumina was only a game.

It had slipped too neatly into her routine, finding a place between the end of her workday and the moment exhaustion finally dragged her under. She came home, fed Sunny, answered a few emails with the hollow discipline of a person running on fumes, and changed into a soft gray sweater before settling onto the couch.

She had lived with that long enough to recognize its shape. What bothered her was how easily the game had begun to soften it.

Sunny followed her from the kitchen carrying a tennis ball in his mouth, his tail sweeping lazily against the side of the couch.

"You already had your walk," Elowen said, pointing at him with her fork.

Sunny dropped the ball beside her foot and stared.

"No."

He stared harder.

She sighed and leaned down to roll it gently across the carpet. Sunny chased it with immediate joy, nails skittering against the floorboards.

Outside, Ravenfall City blurred beneath a steady fall of rain. The windows of the buildings across the street glowed in uneven squares, each one holding someone else's private evening. Elowen watched them for a moment while the microwave hummed behind her.

She wondered, not for the first time, what it felt like to be expected somewhere.

Not invited. Not welcomed politely.

Expected.

As if someone's day had been waiting for the exact moment she entered it.

Her phone sat facedown on the coffee table.

She lasted until her leftovers cooled.

Then she curled into the corner of the couch, tucked the blanket around her legs, and opened Lumina.

The loading screen dissolved into sunlight.

Lucien stood inside an indoor gymnasium with a volleyball tucked against one hip, looking as out of place as a prince forced into a group project. Afternoon light poured through the tall windows, catching in his black hair and sharpening the clean lines of his face. Around him, other students moved in clusters, laughing, shouting, missing serves, bumping into one another with the careless ease of people who had never been afraid of being seen.

Lucien did not look afraid.

He looked deeply inconvenienced.

Elowen smiled before she could stop herself.

"You look like someone sentenced you to organized fun."

His gaze lifted.

The motion was so immediate that her smile faltered.

A message appeared above him.

You came back early today.

Elowen shifted under the blanket, the warmth in her chest turning strangely shy.

Is that your way of saying hello?

Lucien looked at the words for a second, as if he were carefully filing away the correction.

Hello, Lowen.

There it was again.

Lowen.

The nickname still did something unreasonable to her. It sounded too intimate in his careful, quiet way, as if he had taken her name and folded it into something meant only for his mouth.

Elowen cleared her throat even though he could not hear it.

At least, he should not have been able to.

Are you actually playing volleyball?

Lucien glanced toward the court.

A boy across the net attempted a serve so terrible that it struck the wall padding with a loud slap. Several students groaned. The boy laughed it off, apparently immune to shame.

Lucien's expression tightened almost imperceptibly.

Physical education assessment.

And?

I dislike failing publicly.

Elowen's teasing softened at once.

There were moments when Lucien said things too plainly. Not dramatically, not with any obvious attempt to sound wounded, but with the strange, clean honesty of someone who had never learned how to make vulnerability sound casual.

She sat up a little.

Okay. Then I'll teach you.

Lucien went still.

The gym continued around him. Shoes squeaked. A whistle cut through the air. Somewhere near the bleachers, two girls whispered behind their hands and glanced toward him.

Lucien's attention remained fixed on the screen.

You know volleyball?

"A little," Elowen murmured.

A notification slid across the bottom of the interface before she could type.

Voice Guidance Feature Available During Athletic Tutorials.

She stared at it.

For two years, Lumina had given her increasingly strange features exactly when she needed them. She had stopped questioning most of them because the alternative required too much late-night paranoia, but the little microphone icon pulsing at the bottom of her screen still made her pause.

Sunny returned with the tennis ball and nudged it against her ankle.

"Do we think this is a bad idea?" she asked him.

Sunny sneezed.

"Deeply unhelpful."

She tapped ENABLE.

A soft crackle came through the speakers.

Inside the gym, Lucien's fingers tightened around the volleyball.

Elowen noticed because she noticed everything about him now. The slight pause before he moved. The way his shoulders drew inward when something affected him too deeply. The way he tried to hide softness as quickly as it appeared.

"Can you hear me?" she asked.

Lucien lifted his head slowly.

For a suspended moment, he only stared toward the space beyond the screen. Not at the students, not at the coach, not at anything in his own world. His gaze seemed to follow the path of her voice as though it had entered the room like a physical thing.

"Lucien?"

His answer came through her speakers low and careful.

"Lowen."

Elowen had known he would have a voice. Of course he would. The game had always been too polished not to include voice acting eventually. She had expected something pleasant and restrained, maybe a little cold.

She had not expected the sound of her nickname in his mouth to make the apartment feel smaller.

His voice was quiet, almost too controlled, with an undertone that made every word seem chosen rather than spoken. He sounded older than sixteen in a way that briefly unsettled her, but there was something uncertain beneath it too, as if he were approaching her across unfamiliar ground.

Elowen looked down at Sunny, who had settled heavily against her thigh.

"Well," she said, trying for casual and missing by a mile. "That's unfair."

Lucien's face changed.

Only a little.

"Did I do something wrong?"

The question made her heart twist.

"No. Not at all." She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear. "I just wasn't ready for you to sound so…"

She stopped before she could embarrass herself.

"So?" he asked.

"So real," she said, and immediately wished she had chosen a safer word.

Lucien looked at her through the screen with an intensity the game should not have been able to render. The noise of the gym seemed to fall away from him. He stood there with the volleyball in his hands, sunlight bright along one side of his face, and for the first time since she had opened Lumina, Elowen felt an irrational need to apologize to him.

As if calling him unreal had been cruel.

The coach blew a whistle.

"Vale. Serving line."

Lucien turned his head, and whatever had passed through his expression disappeared beneath composure.

Elowen seized the change in subject gratefully.

"Okay, show me your stance."

Lucien obeyed at once.

Something about that made her smile again.

He was brilliant, wealthy, intimidating even in watercolor animation, and yet he listened to her instructions with the absolute concentration of a person receiving sacred knowledge.

"Feet shoulder-width apart," she said. "Don't stand so stiffly. You're not negotiating a hostile takeover."

His brows drew together faintly.

"I don't know what that means."

"It means relax."

"I am relaxed."

"You are absolutely not."

A student walking behind him glanced over after hearing his low reply, then quickly looked away when Lucien's face shifted back into its usual blank politeness.

Elowen hid a laugh behind her hand.

"Hold the ball in your non-dominant hand. No, a little lower. Good. Now draw your serving hand back."

Lucien followed each instruction precisely.

Too precisely.

It took three attempts before she realized he was not actually bad at volleyball. He was simply unused to doing anything without first knowing how to be perfect at it.

On the fourth serve, the ball cleared the net.

Barely.

But it cleared.

Elowen gasped like he had won an Olympic medal.

"Yes! See? I told you."

Lucien watched the ball hit the far court, then looked back toward her with a quietness that softened every hard line in him.

"You sound happy."

"I am happy. That was progress."

"It was only a serve."

"It was a serve you didn't commit emotional warfare against yourself over."

A small smile touched his mouth.

Elowen wished immediately that the game did not make him that pretty when he smiled.

The thought was inappropriate enough that she reached for her mug and drank cold tea just to give herself something else to do.