Chapter 35
The Flame
I woke the next morning, still in Silas’s bed. His scent was all around me, and for one brief moment, I allowed myself to simply breathe him in, to enjoy the warm, masculine smell of my captor.
And then I let the little cocoon Silas had wrapped me in fall apart, because I knew this couldn’t continue.
Silas’s absence the past few days had proven something to me—I’d become too reliant on him. Too needy for his company. When he wasn’t around, I didn’t know what to do with myself.
I had tricked myself into believing that what we shared was normal. Acceptable, even. Just because he’d opened up to me, and shown me his scars, I’d allowed that to erase all the harm he’d caused me. All the harm he’d caused others.
I climbed out of bed, quickly throwing on some clothes—not even bothering to question why Silas had some of my clothes in his wardrobe.
As I was pulling on a pair of fitted jeans, I noticed Silas’s clothes on the floor where he had discarded them last night.
Was I being crazy, or did that black jacket look… patchy in places? Slowly walking over to them, eyeing them like they might come to life and bite me, I tried to rationalise what I was seeing.
Maybe they were still damp from the rain? Maybe they were stained, but not with what I was thinking.
Crouching down low, I soon realised how very wrong I was. As soon as I picked the clothes up, I was hit with an overwhelming smell of copper. When I unfolded the clothes, I discovered more dark patches. Some splattered up the sleeves, and a larger patch in the centre of the jacket.
But the white shirt was truly the prized evidence in this puzzle—the cuffs were soaked in red, the liquid having bled up the material along the sleeves. His collar was also spattered with blood, and there were patches in the middle where it had seeped through the suit jacket he wore.
I dropped the clothes and marched over to the bed, ripping the covers back from his side.
There it was. Flecks of blood on the sheets.
For one moment, one stupid, idiotic moment, I had a flash of concern, thinking maybe Silas had been hurt. And then I remembered who I was dealing with.
The bastard hadn’t even bothered to wash the blood off his body before he came to collect me, forcing me to sleep with him whilst the evidence of his murders was still fresh on his skin.
I’d curled against him. Let him wrap an arm around me. Fallen asleep breathing him in, never realising there was blood drying between us.
What sort of sick fuck did that?!
None of this should have surprised me. I’d spent years hearing stories about Silas Falcone. I’d watched grown men go pale at the mention of his name. I knew exactly what sort of man he was supposed to be.
So why did seeing the proof feel so much worse?
Had I been idiotic enough to think I could change him? This is who Silas was. He was the silent assassin. The man who murdered without remorse.
The man who no longer had anyone to control him.
He had always been under his grandfather’s control—everyone knew that. And since Rafael was now dead, there was no longer anyone to keep Silas in check.
And to think, this was entirely his fault.
I had been happy to bury my head in the sand.
To accept a kidnapper as my lover, because I had been so starved for attention and affection.
I had been so desperate for someone to actually want me, I’d been willing to play the fool.
Then Silas had broken our routine, left me on my own, and now the illusion was shattered.
The truth was, I had no idea where he disappeared to when he left this room.
I knew how he took his coffee. I knew which side of the bed he slept on.
I knew he preferred silence to conversation and that he hated being touched without warning.
But I didn’t know where he went, who he met, or whose blood was drying on the clothes at my feet.
And that was the part I couldn’t forgive myself for.
Not the fear. Not the confusion. Not even the attraction, though God knew I would be unpacking that particular disaster for the rest of my life if I survived long enough to have the luxury of self-reflection.
What I couldn’t forgive was how willingly I had stopped asking questions.
I had been so grateful for every sliver of tenderness he offered me that I had allowed myself to forget tenderness did not make a man good.
It did not erase blood from his hands, or bodies from his path, or the fact that every choice I made within these walls had been offered to me only because he had decided I could have it.
It was an illusion of choice. And I’d fallen for it.
The bedroom door opened behind me. I didn’t bother to turn around straight away.
For some reason, that felt important. Childish, maybe, and completely ridiculous considering he had kidnapped me, locked me in a basement, and apparently returned to bed covered in someone else’s blood, but still, it felt like the only scrap of control I had left.
He couldn’t force me to accept him. He couldn’t force my compliance.
He may have control over the situation, but he couldn’t control me.
So I stared at the clothes on the floor for one second longer, forcing myself to breathe normally, forcing my hands to remain loose at my sides, and then I slowly turned to face him.
And there he stood in the doorway, a fresh suit on, his mask back in place.
The silver gleamed beneath the soft morning light, beautiful in that cold, unsettling way it always was, but this time my eyes didn’t go to the polished edges or the cruel shape of it.
They went straight to the blood smeared along the lower half.
It had dried darker in some places, caught in the fine ridges of the metal and gathered near the sharp line of his jaw, as though someone had reached for him with bloody hands, or he had leaned close enough to be marked by whatever violence had taken place before he came back to me.
He looked from my face to the suit jacket still in my hands.
I waited for the panic to come. I waited for the screaming, the demands, the accusations that usually rose up in me faster than common sense could catch them, but none of it came.
Something colder had taken its place, and for once I didn’t hate it. For once, I was grateful for the strange calm wrapping around me, because I knew if I gave him my anger, he would know what to do with it.
If I gave him fear, he would know what to do with that as well.
Silas understood violence, and panic, and survival. He thrived under those.
I couldn’t give him even a scrap of it. Because if I showed anything other than calm, then it would awaken the beast inside him. It would awaken that primal, almost feral urge he had to be in control, to keep me under lock and key.
His gaze dropped again, slower this time, taking in the ripped-back covers, the abandoned clothes, the blood on the sheets I hadn’t bothered to hide.
Good.
Let him see it.
Let him know I knew.
He hadn’t bothered to hide it from me, so why should I hide my knowledge from him?
Unless, of course, he wanted me to know. Unless he wanted me to be aware of his actions. If he didn’t want to hide anything from me? He left this evidence for me to find, after all. Was this his own way of trying to show me what his life was like?
Because if so, he had made a grave mistake. It didn’t help me accept him. If anything, all it had succeeded in doing was pushing me further away.
And, just like he always did, he didn’t leave an explanation. He didn’t justify. He wanted me to work things out for myself—though it was plainly obvious what I was looking at.
It was the aftermath of a brutal murder.
He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the click of it far too soft for something that sounded so final.
He crossed the room without coming too close to me, though I noticed he placed himself between me and the door as he moved towards the wardrobe.
Of course he did.
Even now, even with blood drying on his mask and his clothes already discarded like evidence, he was aware of every exit, every angle, every possible route I might take. The knowledge should have made me abandon the thought before it had fully formed.
The silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable, which was impressive considering silence was the closest thing Silas had to a native language.
And then he finally turned towards the bathroom, leaving the breakfast tray at the end of the bed.
That was when I knew.
Not in some dramatic lightning-bolt moment. There was no sudden rush of bravery, no empowering swell of confidence that made me believe I could outrun him or outsmart him or escape a house I barely understood. It was much quieter than that. Much simpler.
If he went into that bathroom and closed the door, I was leaving.
I didn’t care if I made it ten feet. I didn’t care if there were guards outside, cameras in every corner, cliffs on one side of the property and endless forest on the other.
I didn’t care if he caught me before I reached the staircase.
I just knew I couldn’t stand in that room for another minute waiting for him to wash someone else’s blood from his skin and return to me as though cleanliness changed anything.
The door clicked softly behind him, and for a few seconds, nothing happened.
I had a brief thought that this was a test. That he knew what I was planning and wanted to see if I was brave—or stupid—enough to do it.
Unlucky for me, I was both.
The shower turned on, and I moved before I could talk myself out of it.
The first few steps were careful, because even then, some terribly sensible part of me understood that running immediately would only make noise.
I crossed the carpet on bare feet, grabbed my phone from the bedside table, and walked to the door with my heart beating so violently I could feel it in my fingertips.