Nicholas’ POV
Lucas. Edvin. Hale.
I’d been watching him for a long time, longer than I’d like to admit. There was something about him that stung. Attracted me. Held me in. The Luca charm.
I’d seen him first at the start of my second year in the academy. He was a first year then.
He had a demeanor like no one else’s. You could see it in the way his shoulders stayed tense, how his jaw never eased up. He stood like someone waiting for a fight but wouldn’t throw a punch when it came.
People kept their distance without knowing why. It wasn’t fear, just something in him that warned them off.
Through last year, I unintentionally found myself observing him. I had no desire to be in his orbit, not at first. He was the kind of person who needed to be avoided to preserve one’s sanity. But as time passed, slowly I grew more interested. Invested. I wanted to have something to do with him.
What started as watching him walk the hallways became watching him wherever he went, whatever he did, silently but always there.
Sometimes I just wanted to be in the same room as he was. Breathe the air he’d just exhaled, trail the paths he’d walked, just to have the faintest idea of how being close to him felt.
I talked to his second, Romeo, for that purpose alone. Learning who he was from the person he was around the most.
Romeo was the exact opposite of Lucas, lively, too common for me to be interested in, but someone I could have found entertaining without Lucas being factored in.
Lucas was a walking dead. A walking dead who hunted for power.
And it never really was to use it. He mocked it like he hated the whole concept while still inhaling it like it was his oxygen.
He was a mystery. A mystery I wanted to unravel.
And as much as I wanted to get into his head, I wanted to get into his body too.
Ever since the day he invited me to the party, things did change. A little attention from him and I was changing my ideologies.
The day I asked him to get coffee with me was the day I realized watching him alone wasn’t going to be enough. If I wanted to know him, I needed to know him from him, on my terms, with my pace.
He told me things I’d been trying to figure out for a while. The answer to what people tended to ask first, how he was an heir to the Viscount of one nation but a representative to another.
I had access to information on every royal and noble in Finland. And all the information he had was from when he was fourteen, when he said his mother died.
I checked his father’s file, which also had information tampered with, unaccounted trips to Norway, months with blank slates, deleted documents. What was it about Lucas that needed to be hidden so bad?
Whatever it was, I didn’t need records for it. I knew the kind of man he was already. I’d seen the pattern one too many times.
I tended to get addicted to things I like. Understanding, uncovering Lucas was addictive, almost as addictive as Lucas himself.
Stalking him had become my favourite pastime.
He mostly used to meet nobles. Each day I’d see him with a different official. If I saw that same official on duty, there was always a sign that they had been working with Lucas.
He hadn’t met any officials over the past few weeks though. Lately, he’s been to a certain place. A place which I found to be a pub.
I sent him a ton of messages, he barely replied any. To get him to talk to me, I needed to poke the right places, with the right words at the right time. The last time we talked, I got him to say yes to a drink with me.
I wanted to get to see a new side of him, the drunk him. I told him I’d find him, more of a hobby than a task, but he still told me where to meet him. He either didn’t trust my skill or was oblivious to it.
Pretending I don’t know where you are won’t change the fact that I always do, Lucas.
I still met him where he said I should.
“Hey, Luca,” I said as I wrapped my arm around his shoulder like I did on our cute little coffee date.
“Hi.” Minimal. I could smell the drink on him, a drink before a drink. How presumptuous could he be?
“Let’s go,” he said as he escaped my arm, walking in front of us.
He took us to the pub he frequents. Was that a sign of trust or was I reading too much into things? He didn’t act like it was anywhere familiar, nor did he act like it was unfamiliar.
We sat, ordered some drinks. But I couldn’t help silently admiring him. His hair was one shade away from black. His eyes, onyx. They were a void. I wanted to get lost in them, in the nothingness in them, and whenever I got close to that, it felt like everything.
He dressed casual, it was the first time seeing him out of the academy’s attire. Even while watching him, he barely changed out of it. I couldn’t tell if he liked it that way or forgot to change it. The shirt he wore hung loose on his body, a brown one along with beige khakis.
He was smiling. Not the fake one he wore most times. It was just a little curve at the tips of his lips. It showed in his movements too. The way his head tilted, fingers danced on the table. There was always that slight difference when he was in a good mood.
A guy brought our drinks in no time. “You look really nice,” I said in the least flirtatious way I could.
“I do, don’t I?” he said and took the first sip of his drink.
“Yeah,” I said. I wanted to reach across and touch him, my fingers on his arms or my lips on his, any would do. Instead of trying either, I spoke.
That was why I had him come, to speak. So I asked, “What changed?”
He gulped the drink down directly from the bottle.
“Nothing’s really changed much,” he said, and looked straight at me for the first time that night. “Except a certain someone who seems overtly interested in me,” he added, then finished the drink in his second gulp.
He opened another bottle like he didn’t just finish the first.
“You have a pretty weird drinking habit,” I said. He laughed a little.
“Want some?” he asked and I realized I hadn’t taken any.
“Not necessarily.”
He shrugged and took more anyways. A few more minutes passed. It didn’t take much to notice he was drunk.
“Ask me another one,” he said.
“Another one of what?”
“Your questions, Blondie.”
“Ahh,” was how my thinking sounded like. “What are you sexually attracted to?”
“Politics.”
“You get hard for politics?”
“More or less.”
“Well, does politics have to be a woman?”
“Whatever gets me what I want.”
“Have you ever been with a man?”
“No.”
“Thought of it?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Unnecessary.”
“But you’d be with a man if it gets you what you want.”
“Probably,” he slurred.
“What do you want?”
“I want…” and he started trailing off. His head slumped down onto the table. I let my fingers thread through his hair as I helped him lift it.
“What?”
“My mom,” he said.
“I miss my mum.” He took his head down again, but this felt intentional.
“I wish I was man enough.”
“For what?” He didn’t answer that. He wasn’t talking anymore. I massaged his nape. He groaned as he raised his head again. He still drank more, till he became less active, less alive, less him.
“Home,” he said.
“Home?”
“I want to go home.”
“Where is it?” I knew where it was, but I liked when he told me things.
Lucas lived in a condo, alone. He had a room in the dorms but hadn’t bothered going there since he joined the academy. He could have been at his father’s house too, but he chose to stay in a condo and take extra measures to make sure people didn’t know where it was.
He told me where it was. I took him there. He punched in the code at the door, and we went in.
He walked to an inner room which I assumed was his bedroom, then came out only wearing sweatpants. He went to his kitchen, opened the fridge which would be empty without the few cans in it. Five, to be exact. He grabbed two, walked to where I stood, and gave one to me.
He went to his couch and sat with the other in his hand. Popped it open and started drinking. I tasted it. It was alcoholic and he drank it like he hadn’t been drinking all night, like he wasn’t already drunk.
I dropped the can on the table nearest to me as I sat beside him.
And I watched him. He was done with the can he had on hand, squeezed it, and tossed it elsewhere. He spotted the one I dropped on the table and took it. He finished that in no time and fell asleep.
Who lets someone they barely know into their home, gets drunk, and falls asleep?
I let my hand thread through his hair to see his sleeping face better. A few minutes after, I took him into his room, then let myself out.
Out of his room, out of his home.
I didn’t need him waking up to me there.
Lucas didn’t seem like the kind to have a drinking problem. But then again, the version of himself he projected outward wasn’t even him.
Who really was Lucas?
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Author’s note: Hope you liked this chapter! I’d be glad if you left a comment, review or a simple reaction. Love yall <3
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