Luna did not call him out on it directly.
That somehow made it worse. She just kept looking at him with that quiet, unreadable confusion that made him feel even more ridiculous than if she had simply asked whether he had lost his mind.
Which, in fairness, was becoming a reasonable question.
They kept talking for a while after that. At least, Luna kept talking.
Ludger answered when needed, nodded when appropriate, and managed to keep his expression steady enough that no one looking from the outside would have guessed anything was off. But his mind had already started drifting somewhere else entirely, and once it did, it refused to let go.
He looked at Luna while she spoke and began piecing things together whether he wanted to or not.
For a while now, even a little before the island, she had been acting strangely around him.
Not dramatically. Never dramatically. That would have been too easy.
It was always in small things. The way she watched him sometimes. The strange calmness that felt just a little too deliberate. The moments where her usual restraint slipped by a hair and then locked back into place so quickly that it almost felt imagined.
He tried to trace back where it had started. Sixteen, maybe. Around then. That felt about right.
And if he was being honest with himself, the answer was not that hard to imagine. He was the half-brother of her mistress. They had spent a lot of time around each other.
Enough time that simple acquaintance could naturally grow into something else without either of them noticing it clearly at first.
Luna did not know her parents.
Torvares, while dependable in his own way, was more her boss than anything warmer than that. A figure of authority. Stability, perhaps. But not family in the softer sense.
Viola was different. With Viola, Luna had found something close to a sister. That much was obvious enough. So maybe, somewhere along the way, she had found something else in Ludger too.
Something close to a father. Or an older brother.
Someone older in spirit than his age suggested. Someone more mature, more grounded, more severe when needed. Someone who had, in his own dry and inconvenient way, given her advice that mattered and treated her like a person capable of change rather than just a useful shadow attached to someone else’s life.
For someone with Luna’s background, it would not have been surprising if that got mixed up inside her. Especially when she had spent so long being expected to suppress herself. To contain everything.
Thoughts, wants, irritation, needs, uncertainty, all of it locked down behind habit until even she might not always know where one feeling ended and another began.
People like that did not always sort their emotions cleanly. Not at first. Not when they were only beginning to get space to feel them at all. Ludger did not like psychoanalyzing her like this.
It felt intrusive. A little arrogant too. As if he were standing above the situation and reducing someone else’s inner life into neat little reasons because it made things easier for him to understand.
He disliked that. A lot. Still, even if he disliked it, the judgment itself felt logical.
More logical, at least, than jumping straight to the more troublesome interpretations his mind had been trying to throw at him all morning. So he sat there, listening with half an ear while Luna continued speaking, and quietly settled on that explanation because it was the one that made the most sense.
Not ideal. Not fully comfortable. But logical. And logic, even when it was inconvenient, was usually better than letting his thoughts run loose in stupid directions.
Ludger’s fingers rested lightly around the warm cup, but his attention had already turned inward again.
What exactly was he supposed to tell Luna? That was the problem.
Not the simple kind, either. Not something he could solve with a clean answer, a hard truth, or a practical order that pushed the uncertainty off the road and let him keep walking.
This was messier.
If he got ahead of himself, if he assumed too much, named feelings she had not named, or forced meaning onto things that might still be half-formed even in her own mind, then he could hurt her.
Badly. And not with some dramatic cruelty either. That would have been easier to hate.
No, this would be the quiet kind. The kind that came from deciding too early what someone meant and then speaking to that imagined truth as if it were already solid. If Luna was still sorting herself out, if what she felt was tangled up with gratitude, safety, admiration, freedom, dependence, old restraint, and the strange new space opening up in front of her life… then pushing too hard in the wrong direction could leave marks.
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Ludger did not want that. At all. But waiting came with its own problem. If he said nothing and simply let things continue, then what?
If Luna really was moving toward something deeper, and he just stood there pretending not to notice until she forced herself to speak plainly one day, then he might be letting her waste time. Time thinking. Time hoping. Time building something in her own head while he remained silent because it was more convenient for him than risking an uncomfortable conversation.
That was ugly too. Cowardly, maybe. And he hated cowardice most when it wore the shape of caution. He looked at Luna while she spoke, calm and controlled across from him, and felt that same tension pull tighter in his chest.
There was no easy path through this. Because the truth was even worse underneath it all. Ludger did not truly love any girl. Not really. Not in the clean way people seemed to expect.
He could recognize beauty. Attraction too, obviously. He was not dead. He could see when someone was pretty, capable, desirable, dangerous, or all of those things at once. He could understand why other men got pulled around by looks, curves, warmth, smiles, softness, or charm.
But love? That was different. And whenever he tried to be honest with himself about it, he ran into the same wall. He didn’t know if the problem was that he was mentally older than almost anyone he could reasonably marry… Or if it was something else entirely.
Maybe that age gap inside him ruined the shape of it before it could properly begin. Maybe seeing the world through a mind that had already lived too much made it hard to fall into things the way others did. Maybe he was simply too detached. Too used to pressure. Too used to treating life like a series of problems to solve and responsibilities to shoulder.
Or maybe he was just broken in some smaller, quieter way. If he had been like his father, things would have been easier. Arslan had always seemed like the sort of man who could be won over by something simple and direct. Someone pretty, warm, affectionate, lively. Easy.
A girl like Kaela would probably be enough for him. Or Elira, who was well-endowed enough that an alarming percentage of men would probably stop thinking properly after two minutes in her presence.
Ludger understood that. He just wasn’t built the same way. Not mentally. Not emotionally. Not in any way that made this easier. He stared down into his coffee for a brief moment, then looked away and let his eyes drift toward the street below.
The capital moved beneath the wide windows in layers of motion and noise, people crossing, voices rising, merchants calling, wagons rolling, guards pacing, colors shifting through the crowd. He watched it without really seeing it for a second, his thoughts still caught in the same knot.
Then, for some reason, his gaze pulled left.
Not consciously.
Just a quiet instinct. A tug. His eyes settled on a narrow alley between two buildings.
And there, standing deep enough in the shadow to be missed by almost anyone not already looking, was someone staring directly at him.
Ludger went still. The face was familiar. Very familiar. The illusionist. Or at least the face the guy had used the day they met at the black market.
The same features. The same irritatingly calm look. For half a second, neither of them moved. Then the illusionist smiled. It was not a friendly smile. Not mocking either. Just deliberate.
Then he lifted one hand and pointed to his left. Ludger’s eyes followed the line immediately.
Across the street and a little farther down, moving through the crowd with the kind of presence that made space around him without anyone clearly realizing why, was a heavily armored warrior.
His chestplate was shaped like a dragon. Not decorated with one.
Shaped like one, curved metal plates layered to evoke scales and ridged muscle, the front rising in a stylized draconic form that made the entire armor look less forged and more like something carved from the idea of a beast.
And he was looking right at Ludger. Their eyes met. For one sharp instant, the street noise seemed to vanish. Then the warrior turned away as if nothing had happened and kept walking, disappearing back into the movement of the capital with the quiet certainty of someone who had seen enough.
Ludger’s gaze snapped back to the alley. The illusionist was gone. No trace. No lingering motion. Nothing except shadow and stone, as if he had never been there at all.
Ludger’s expression cooled instantly. Every wandering thought vanished. Luna said something across from him, but he barely heard the first part of it. Because the knot in his mind had just been cut cleanly in half by something far more immediate.
The illusionist had shown himself on purpose. The armored warrior had been pointed out on purpose. And both of them had chosen to do it where Ludger would understand that this was not coincidence. Which meant the game had moved again.
Luna noticed the change in him immediately.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
Ludger kept his eyes on the street for another second, making sure the alley remained empty and the armored warrior did not reappear from the crowd like some patient threat with too much confidence.
Then he said, quietly, “I saw two unusual figures outside.”
Luna’s posture sharpened at once.
“They were both staring at me.”
That made her eyes open wider. Not dramatically. Just enough. Enough that he could tell she truly had not seen them.
She didn’t say anything after that, but she didn’t need to. The silence itself made it obvious. For all her skill, for all her awareness, whatever had just happened had slipped past her entirely.
Ludger clicked his tongue softly.
“So,” he said, voice still low and even, “the plan not to stand out failed.”
Luna’s gaze moved toward the window, careful not to be too direct now, but the delay had already made that pointless. Whatever chance they had of catching those two in a clean, natural way was gone.
Still, she remained composed. That much, at least, was good.
Ludger continued before she could speak. “There’s no point moving all of a sudden.”
Luna looked back at him.
“It would make them think we’re nervous,” he said. “Or confirm that we noticed them.”
She nodded once, understanding immediately. That was the problem now.
If they rushed out, if they stood too quickly, if they abandoned the table and started searching the street below like a pair of fools, then they would only tell whoever was watching that the message had landed cleanly.
And Ludger had no intention of giving them that satisfaction. At the same time, they couldn’t stay wandering around like this for too long either.
Not now.
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