Chapter 10
Octavia
My legs move before the rest of me catches up.
Water drags at my clothes as I force myself toward the edge of the pool, my limbs suddenly heavy and clumsy, like the cold has turned them to something untrustworthy.
Someone reaches out to help me up, maybe Kadin, maybe someone else, but I barely feel it.
All I can hear is the blood rushing in my ears as the jagged edge of panic scrapes up my throat.
The boy on the patio floor is on his side at first, body jerking violently, shoes scraping uselessly against wet concrete. His cup has spilled beside him, red plastic tipped over in a puddle of diluted liquor. A ring of partygoers has formed around him, but no one is doing anything except staring.
Kadin is the first voice that cuts through clearly.
“Call 911,” he shouts, spinning toward the crowd. “Now. Stop fucking looking at him and call.”
His voice is louder than I have ever heard it, stripped of all that easy warmth from earlier. One of his friends fumbles for his phone with shaking hands. Another girl is crying already, hands over her mouth, backing away like distance might make this less real.
In the pool, Cheyenne and Maria are frozen.
They haven’t climbed out yet. They just stare from the water, shoulders slick, shining under the blue lights, both of them wide-eyed in a way I have never seen before. Cheyenne’s mouth is open, but no sound comes out. Maria looks pale beneath the flush the alcohol had given her only minutes ago.
The whole world starts to stutter.
Noise surges, then fades. The music is still playing somewhere, absurdly loud, but it sounds far away now. The party lights keep flashing. Someone is swearing. Someone else keeps saying oh my God over and over again until the words lose meaning.
My feet hit the patio.
A sharp breath tears into my lungs, and for one awful second the night folds in on itself. I’m not here anymore. I’m back in that motel room. Back on stained carpet. Back with my mother’s body beneath my hands, the operator’s voice crackling through a phone I almost dropped.
No.
Not now.
The panic claws upward harder, threatening to split me open… then I see him.
Silas is already on his knees beside the boy.
Not hesitating. Not watching. Moving.
He has the boy flat on his back now, one hand braced at the jaw, the other checking for breath with quick, practiced efficiency. There is nothing chaotic about him. No trace of the drunken possessiveness from a minute ago. No sharp edge meant only for me.
He looks terrifyingly calm.
Like he has been here before.
Like his body knows exactly what to do even if the rest of the yard is crumbling into noise.
He starts compressions.
The heel of his hand presses down hard in the center of the boy’s chest, his other palm stacked over it, elbows locked.
The movement is brutal, each compression measured, deep enough to make the boy’s whole torso jolt.
Water drips from Silas’s soaked sleeves onto the boy’s shirt.
His wet hair hangs into his face, but he doesn’t stop to push it back.
Something in me clicks into place at the sight.
The panic doesn’t vanish, it focuses.
Dropping to my knees beside him, the concrete stings through my skin. My breathing is still too fast, my heart still trying to break out of my chest, but the question comes anyway.
“What did he take?”
My voice sounds rough, thinner than I want it to, but it lands between us.
Silas doesn’t look at me right away. His hands never stop moving.
“It was just some coke,” one of the guys blurts out from somewhere behind us, his voice shaking so hard the words nearly collapse into each other. “He’s done it before-”
Silas’s hands never stop.
“It wasn’t just coke,” he says flatly, the compressions landing hard beneath his palms. “Or it was cut with something.”
The certainty in his voice cuts straight through the panic around us.
The boy’s friend stumbles closer, eyes wild, hands hovering uselessly at his own head as if he wants to help but has no idea how. “I swear to God, it was just one line. Maybe two. He said he was fine.”
Fine.
The word hits me like a slap.
My stomach twists, the patio beneath my knees starting to feel too familiar again. The flashing pool lights against wet concrete, the bodies crowding in too close, the awful helplessness of everyone watching and no one understanding how quickly “fine” turns into dead.
“Did he take anything else?” I ask, forcing the question out before my own head can spiral. “Pills? Anything to drink? Anything else tonight?”
The guy shakes his head too fast. “Just booze. And that. I think. I don’t know. I don’t fucking know.”
Silas shifts, angling the boy’s chin up more firmly between compressions, his whole focus narrowed down to survival. There is no hesitation in him now. No taunting. No jealousy. No cruel little games. Just the ruthless efficiency of someone who has learned what happens when you waste time.
“Does anyone here have Narcan?” he barks, finally lifting his head enough to look at the crowd.
No one answers.
A girl near the back starts crying harder.
Kadin appears beside us again, crouching now, his breathing rough from panic and running. “911 is on the phone. Ambulance is coming. They want to know if he’s breathing.”
“He’s not breathing right,” Silas says, his tone clipped. “Tell them possible opioid overdose. Tell them if they have Narcan in the kit, they need it ready the second they get here.”
Kadin repeats it immediately into the phone, his face pale.
The friend who’d been talking drops down onto his knees across from us, shaking so violently he almost tips over. “He doesn’t do that shit,” he says, looking at the boy like if he says it enough times it might undo reality. “He just likes to party. He doesn’t do that kind of shit.”
Silas’s jaw tightens.
“Doesn’t matter what he likes,” he says. “It matters what’s in his body now.”
His hands press down again. Once. Twice. Three times. Each compression is deep enough to make me flinch, but he never slows. Water still drips from the ends of his sleeves, his soaked flannel clinging to his back and shoulders, every muscle in his arms working with brutal precision.
I can’t stop staring at his hands.
Can’t stop remembering mine on my mother’s chest, smaller and weaker, shaking too hard to count right.
Not like this.
He knows what he’s doing.
The realization settles somewhere painful in my ribs.
“What do you need?” I ask, because if I stop moving, stop speaking, I’ll start seeing the motel room again instead of this patio.
His eyes flick to me for only a second. They’re sharp, sober in a way the rest of him isn’t, unreadable except for one thing: urgency.
“Count with me,” he says.
So I do.
The numbers come out thin at first, catching on breaths I can barely control.
But with each compression, each count, my voice steadies a little.
Around us, the party has become a ring of horrified silence broken only by the operator on speaker, Kadin relaying instructions, and the wet slap of Silas’s hands against the boy’s chest.
Somewhere behind me, I hear Cheyenne finally climb out of the pool. Maria is with her. Their wet footsteps slap across the patio, but neither of them comes too close.
The boy’s friend keeps muttering to himself, half prayer, half denial.
“Come on, man. Come on. Come on.”
The night feels suspended.
Silas doesn’t stop. “Stay with me,” he snaps, though he isn’t looking at the boy so much as commanding death itself to back the hell off.
And for the first time since I met him, I understand that whatever darkness lives in Silas did not make him helpless.
It made him dangerous in all the ways survival requires.
The count breaks.
One second I’m still saying the numbers with him, forcing each one out through a throat that feels too tight, and the next something in Silas changes.
It is small at first, almost invisible if you aren’t watching him closely.
His hand shifts from the center of the boy’s chest to his neck. Two fingers press hard, searching.
Nothing.
He checks again.
Still nothing.
The color drains from his face in a way that makes my stomach sink.
Not fear exactly. Not panic. Something worse.
A stunned, splintering disbelief, as if his body refuses to accept what his hands are telling him.
He starts compressions again anyway, harder now, more desperate than precise.
The earlier rhythm is still there, but it has frayed.
Water flies from his sleeves with each downward shove, his breathing turning rough.
“Come on,” he mutters, not to us, not even really to the boy. To the moment itself. To whatever God decides these things. “Come on.”
The patio has gone nearly silent around us.
Kadin is still on the phone, voice hoarse as he relays updates to the operator, but the sound feels distant.
The boy’s friend is crying openly now, hands shaking at his mouth.
Cheyenne and Maria stand a few feet away, pale and dripping pool water onto the concrete, both of them looking sick.
Silas checks for a pulse again.
Nothing.
This time it hits him.
His shoulders lock as his face goes strangely blank for half a second, then not blank at all. Frazzled. Cracked open. Shock bleeding through the hard edges he wears like armor. He looks suddenly too young, too dangerous, and far too drunk to be here when authorities arrive.
Then…I hear it.
Sirens.
Faint at first, before growing louder.
My whole body goes cold in a different way than the pool ever managed. It is not the boy anymore, not for one split second. It is Silas. The Warden. Conditions. Rules. Courts. Everything he said in the car about one mistake being enough to drag him back under.
If the ambulance and police come and they ask questions, he cannot be kneeling here soaked through, drunk and already on thin ice with the system.
He cannot be the last thing they remember about this boy.
My hands move before the thought is fully finished. Fingers close hard around Silas’s forearms, wet flannel bunching beneath my grip.
“Silas, we have to go.”
He doesn’t look at me. He barely seems to hear it. His hands hover over the boy’s chest like he still plans to keep going until somebody physically drags him away.
“I have to help,” he says, the words slurred enough now that the alcohol shows through for the first time since he touched the boy. “I have t-”
“We have to go,” I say again, sharper this time, tightening my hold on him.
Something in my tone must reach him. Or maybe it is the sirens swelling closer. Or maybe it is the awful recognition already settling into his bones that there is nothing left for his hands to do.
His head turns finally.
For one second, his eyes meet mine, and whatever panic or fracture was visible there shutters closed with brutal speed. The warmth, the frenzy, the rawness, all of it disappears behind something cold and remote.
Then he stands.
No argument. No protest. No explanation.
Just that same distant silence as he turns and starts moving away from the patio.
Rising too fast, my knees unsteady as I hurry after him through the bodies making way for the paramedics now rushing through the gate.
Somewhere behind me, Kadin is shouting for room.
Somebody else is sobbing. The whole backyard has dissolved into disaster, flashing red-blue lights bleeding over the fence.
Near the side of the house, I slam lightly into someone coming the other way.
Lacey.
The cheerleader from the closet.
Her hair is mussed, lip gloss smeared, cup still in one hand like the rest of the night hasn’t fully caught up to her. She blinks at me, then glances past me toward the chaos unfolding near the pool.
“What the fuck is happening?”
“I can’t talk right now,” I say, already trying to move past her.
She catches my arm for a second, confused more than alarmed.
“Wait. Does Silas want his money back?”
I stop.
My head turns back to her slowly. “What?”
Lacey looks thrown by the question. “Your family is hosting him, right? The exchange thing?”
I stare at her.
“What are you talking about?”
She lifts the hand not holding the cup. Folded between two fingers is a bill.
A hundred dollars.
“In the closet,” she says, lowering her voice instinctively even though no one around us is paying attention.
“He paid me to pretend something was happening. That’s it.
He didn’t want to touch me. Didn’t even try.
He just said he needed people to think…” She trails off, glancing down at the money, then back toward where Silas disappeared. “He said he wanted to make a point.”
For a second I can’t feel my feet.
All at once, pieces of him rearrange themselves into something even less understandable.
The smirk. The closet. The smile that hit me like a knife because I thought it meant something it didn’t.
Lacey’s expression shifts as she looks past me again toward the patio, where paramedics are now crowded around the boy’s body.
“Holy shit,” she breathes. “Is he alive?”
But I’m already moving.
The question goes unanswered as I push past her and keep going, chasing Silas into the dark edge of the yard with a hundred more questions burning in my chest than I had a minute ago.