Chapter 12
Octavia
Bright morning light drags me out of sleep with no mercy at all.
For a few disoriented seconds, I lie there caught between warmth and ache, not fully in the room yet, not fully in myself either.
Then the night comes back in pieces, each one sharper than the last. Kadin’s party.
The kiss in the pool. The boy on the patio floor.
Sirens. Silas’s hands on a chest that stopped rising.
The drive home. His room. His mouth on my scars.
The way he held me like I was something he wanted and something he was trying to protect himself from at the same time.
Silas.
My eyes open fully.
The bed is no longer shared. The sheets are twisted, damp in certain places, cold where his body used to be. His side is empty. For one strange second, disappointment hits before sense does.
I hate myself a little for it.
The clothes from last night are gone from the floor, but when I glance toward the hamper, I catch the dark shape of them tossed inside.
Proof that I didn’t imagine any of it. Proof that I really did fall asleep in his bed with my cheek on his chest, listening to a heartbeat that sounded too alive for someone who had looked so broken only hours before.
The blanket slips slightly when I move, my gaze dropping to follow its movement.
Faint bruises bloom at my hips.
My breath catches.
The marks are subtle, but unmistakable, already darkening where his fingers had held me, where his hands had tightened just enough to leave evidence.
Heat rushes through me all over again, sudden and mortifying, because the sight of them drags his mouth back into my mind with cruel clarity.
The way he kissed low on my stomach like the scars there were not scars at all but something precious.
The way the room had narrowed around his hands and breath and the unbearable slowness of him.
Dragging a hand through my hair, I sit up too fast, forcing air into my lungs.
Thinking becomes difficult when memory insists on being physical.
My phone is sitting where I must have abandoned it last night, half-hidden on Silas’s dresser.
I grab it, grateful for the distraction, but the relief vanishes the second the screen lights up.
Message after message floods in from Cheyenne and Maria, along with a number I don’t recognize until I read the first line.
Kadin.
My stomach twists.
Thumb trembling, I scroll through the thread, skimming frantic check-ins, drunken apologies turned sober concern, fragmented details from the aftermath. One message, repeated in different forms by all three of them, lodges itself in my chest hard enough to make me stop breathing for a second.
He did not make it.
The room goes still.
My mouth goes dry. I swallow against something bitter climbing up my throat, but it doesn’t help. The boy from the patio. The one Silas was trying to drag back with his bare hands while everyone else froze...dead.
My grip on the phone tightens until my knuckles hurt.
That boy died in front of us.
That boy died with Silas’s hands on him, with mine counting compressions, with all of us waiting for sirens and praying for time to move faster. There is nowhere for the horror of that to go. It just stays.
When I force myself to look at the time, a whole new kind of panic arrives.
7:00 a.m. Monday.
Silas’s first day at Spokehaven.
We have one hour.
The thought slams me back into motion. I shove off the bed, still wrapped in yesterday’s wrinkled shirt, and head straight for the door. My fingers close around the handle at the same time it swings inward from the other side.
I walk directly into him.
The impact is immediate, solid enough to knock a breath out of me. My hands fly up instinctively, colliding with warm skin instead of fabric, and when I look up, every thought in my head dies at once.
Silas stands in the doorway fresh from the shower, water still slipping from his hair before moving down the planes of his throat.
A towel is secured low around his waist, doing very little to make the situation easier on me.
In the dark last night, his body had been all shadows, flashes of skin, scars and heat.
Morning light is crueler. It reveals everything.
The span of his shoulders. The hard lines of his stomach.
The faded violence written into him in pale marks and old damage.
His hair is pushed back, damp and darker than usual, exposing the scars near his temples more clearly. His expression is still clouded with sleep and confusion, like he hadn’t expected to find me on the other side of the door either.
For one unbearable second, neither of us speaks.
My gaze betrays me almost instantly, catching where the towel sits on his hips before I force it back up to his face. The memory of last night flashes so vividly it makes my skin burn. His hands on my thighs. His mouth low on my stomach. His voice against my skin.
There’s no way to stop myself from turning red.
The muffled sound of my parents moving around downstairs saves me from having to say anything coherent. Cabinets opening. Footsteps. The ordinary sounds of morning crashing into the silence between us hard enough to break it.
Without trusting myself to form a single normal sentence, I slip past him into the hallway, making a desperate retreat for the bathroom. The floor is cold under my feet. My pulse is not even pretending to behave. I do not look back.
The bathroom door closes behind me with just enough force to sound accidental. Only then do I let myself lean over the sink and stare at my own reflection.
My face is flushed. My hair is a disaster. There are bruises at my hips and too much memory sitting in my mouth.
Somewhere right outside that door is Silas, fresh from the shower, sober enough to remember or cruel enough to deny it, and I have no idea which possibility is worse.
By the time I make it downstairs, the house has fully committed to pretending this is a normal Monday morning.
Coffee brews somewhere in the background.
The toaster had clearly done its best before I gave up halfway through and settled for tearing into a waffle that is still cold in the middle.
Light spills through the kitchen windows in that pale, early way that makes everything look too clean, too untouched by what happened last night.
I know better.
The shower helped with the chlorine. It washed away the stale scent of the party, the sticky gloss Maria left on my mouth, the sweat and dampness from sleeping in someone else’s bed.
It did nothing for my memory. It did nothing for the bruises at my hips that bloomed darker while I got dressed.
It did nothing for the image of Silas standing in his doorway in nothing but a towel, or the way my body reacted before my mind could catch up and remind me what a terrible idea any of this is.
So now I stand at the counter in black leggings and a Spokehaven University sweatshirt, chewing on a frozen waffle like it somehow counts as breakfast, trying very hard not to think about any of it.
It isn’t working.
The messages from Cheyenne, Maria, and Kadin are still sitting in my phone like a weight I keep picking up and setting back down.
The worst part isn’t even the panic in them anymore.
It’s the finality. The certainty. The message that still sits at the top of my head no matter what else I try to think over it.
He did not make it.
A boy is dead.
And somewhere upstairs, the boy who tried to bring him back is getting dressed for his first day at my school.
Footsteps sound in the hallway before I hear him.
They’re light, almost annoyingly quiet. By the time I glance up, Silas is already in the kitchen.
He doesn’t announce himself. Doesn’t say good morning.
He just moves toward the pantry with the ease of someone who already understands how to exist in a room without asking permission for the space he takes up.
He opens the pantry door, grabs a protein bar, and shuts it again without so much as glancing my way.
He’s dressed now. Hoodie zipped halfway, dark jeans clinging to those tall legs, ball cap pulled low so his expression stays half-shadowed.
The look should be ordinary, but it suits him with a precision that smooths him back into someone sharper, someone harder to read, someone far closer to the boy who stepped into my life than the one who let me feel his mouth trembling on my skin in the dark.
My gaze makes the mistake of catching on his mouth for maybe half a second.
That’s all it takes.
Heat rockets into my face so fast it burns.
I jerk my eyes away, shove another bite of waffle into my mouth like chewing can erase what his lips did to me, like syrup can drown out the memory of his tongue sliding over the scars I spent years hiding.
But the second I blink I see it again: the way he sucked at me, the way his tongue tasted me through my underwear until his mouth turned wet with me, the way my knees buckled when he groaned perfect into my stomach.
It’s worse now because I know how he looks under the hoodie, under the jeans, how his shoulders stretch bare, how the tattoo curls over his hip, how the length of him pressed hard against soaked sweats consumes my mind.
The chair across from me scrapes softly as he sits.
Silence sprawls between us, crowded with everything we didn’t say: the boy on the patio, the brutal ride home, the way I slept with his arms still around me and ran the second I could.
He unwraps a protein bar slowly, fingers steady, expression unreadable beneath that cap.
I keep my eyes pinned to the sad wedge of waffle, trying not to replay the sight of his tongue glistening with me.