Chapter 16
Octavia
If you had told me two weeks ago that I’d be standing in my kitchen missing the chaos of Silas Corvin, I would have laughed in your face.
Not politely either.
I would have looked you dead in the eye and asked if you had me confused with some other girl, some girl with worse instincts than mine, some girl stupid enough to feel the absence of a boy who walked into her life like a storm and touched every bruise he could find.
But that was before I learned that silence can be crueler than conflict.
Before I learned that distance, when it’s deliberate enough, can feel like its own kind of violence.
Now I live with a ghost.
He’s still in the house. Technically. His shoes still end up by the door sometimes.
His boxing wraps dry over the laundry room sink.
His bedroom door still shuts every night.
But that’s all he feels like lately. A presence reduced to evidence.
A shadow that moves around the edges of my life without ever fully stepping into it.
It started gradually enough that I almost convinced myself I imagined it.
One skipped dinner turned into three. Then he stopped coming home before dark.
Then the mornings changed too. No more silent drives to campus with that unbearable tension filling the car.
No more clipped questions over protein bars and coffee.
He started taking cabs to Spokehaven instead, slipping out before I could catch him or coming back after everyone had already settled in for the night.
When he did show up on campus, it was inconsistent enough to make me stop looking for him, which somehow only made me look harder.
And then there was the gym.
The boxing gym has swallowed whatever parts of him this house couldn’t.
He spends hours there, longer than anyone reasonably should, coming home with split knuckles, sweat-soaked shirts, and eyes that look even farther away than before.
Mom says it’s good for him. Dad says structure helps.
Neither of them notices that he barely speaks anymore, or maybe they notice and call it progress because adults love pretending distance is the same thing as healing.
The worst part is that I have no idea why.
That is what keeps needling at me. Not just the distance itself, but the fact that it arrived without explanation and settled in so completely that now I can’t even tell if I imagined the warmth that came before it.
One minute there was a boy in a room with his mouth on my scars, telling me morning only makes people cowardly enough to deny what happened.
The next, there was this version of him. Cold and unreachable.
Creative Arts disappeared from his schedule after the absences piled up.
Dad told me not to worry about it. Told me the transition was hard and some students need time. Told me Silas had been through a lot and Spokehaven might take some getting used to. He said it with that same careful patience parents use when they think they’re handling something fragile correctly.
He has no idea.
No idea that Silas and I shared stolen moments that never should have happened and somehow still felt inevitable.
No idea how quickly those moments were stripped back from me, leaving behind only fragments, heat, and questions that don’t stop multiplying no matter how hard I try to starve them.
No idea that the silence in this house doesn’t feel like adjustment.
It feels personal.
And maybe that’s the cruelest part of all.
Because if he had snapped, if he had gotten mean again, if he had said something cutting enough to make me hate him properly, at least I would know where I stood. At least I could build anger around the wound and call it armor.
Instead, I’m left with uncertainty.
With the memory of his body pressed against mine in the dark.
With the bruises that faded before I was ready to let them.
“Earth to Octavia.”
Kadin’s voice comes through the phone again, gentler this time, but it still jolts me hard enough that the spoon knocks against the edge of the ice cream tub.
I’ve been staring for too long.
Not at anything important, at least not by normal standards.
Just a set of bloodied boxing wraps abandoned on the counter beside the sink, half-unraveled, stiff in the places where the blood dried darker than the fabric.
They’ve become an ordinary sight in the house now, which somehow unsettles me more than if they still shocked me.
It means I’ve gotten used to Silas disappearing into the gym until he comes back bruised, silent, and wrecked enough to leave little pieces of himself behind in the kitchen.
“Sorry,” I say, pushing the freezer door closed with my hip, settling the phone more tightly between my shoulder and ear. “My parents are out on date night, and apparently that means I lose all self-control around rocky road.”
The lid peels back with a soft snap. I dig the spoon in and take a generous bite, too cold, yet, exactly what I wanted. The pleasure of it hits fast enough that I let out a quiet, involuntary sound before swallowing.
“God,” I murmur, “I needed that.”
Kadin goes quiet for just a second too long.
Then he clears his throat. “I can give you and the ice cream some privacy if this is getting serious.”
That makes me laugh, the sound feeling easier than it has any right to. “Shut up.”
He laughs too. For a few seconds it almost feels normal.
The kind of late-night call a girl is supposed to have with a boy she kissed by a pool.
The kind where the flirting slides naturally into place, where you stop pretending you don’t know what he means when his voice drops warmer, where the next step feels obvious instead of impossible.
“So…” he says, dragging the word out just enough to make his intentions clear. “Your parents are gone.”
There it is again.
That strange, immediate twist in my stomach.
Not nerves exactly. Not disinterest either.
Something more complicated than either of those, and much more annoying.
Kadin has been flirting with me ever since the party, ever since that kiss that should have made this simple.
By every normal standard, I should want him to flirt.
I should be feeding into it. I should be making this easy for both of us.
Instead, every time he nudges the moment toward something more direct, I feel myself stiffen around it.
I’m standing in my kitchen in a thin tank top and panties, one bare leg bent against the cabinet, eating ice cream straight out of the tub with my parents out of the house.
If I wanted to, I could give him exactly the kind of image his imagination is probably already building.
I could tease him. Make him work for it. Make this fun.
So why does the idea feel wrong the second it gets close?
“They are,” I say carefully, dragging the spoon through the melting top layer of ice cream. “But Silas isn’t.”
Kadin makes a low sound of irritation. It isn’t mean, but it isn’t subtle either. “Fuck him, right?”
The dread comes back immediately.
Not because I think Silas would care if I had a boy over. Not because I think he’d play family police and go running to my parents. If anything, that would require a kind of wholesome investment in our household dynamics that he’s never once shown.
“No,” I say, though I make myself laugh lightly afterward, trying to smooth the edges off what I actually feel. “I’m not risking him telling my parents.”
Even as I say it, I know it’s a lie.
Silas would never tell.
Which leaves me with the much uglier truth I keep refusing to look at straight on. For some reason, I do not want Kadin sneaking into this house. The thought of him here, in these rooms, moving through this place after midnight, feels wrong in a way I can’t explain cleanly enough to say out loud.
God, what is wrong with me?
Tapping the spoon absently against my thigh, Kadin exhales in mock suffering. “Look, I’m all for stolen moments between classes whenever you let me have them, but when are you actually going to let me take you on a proper date?”
The question lands. He isn’t pushing. He isn’t being sleazy. He’s offering the exact thing a good guy is supposed to offer. Time and effort. Something real.
And still I freeze.
The spoon slips slightly in my hand as a thick ribbon of melted ice cream slides off the edge. It lands directly on the front of my tank top before I can stop it, the cold soaking through the fabric and against the skin of my breast.
Gasping, I look down instantly, lifting the shirt away from my chest with my free hand on instinct, more startled by the sensation than anything else.
That’s when I see him.
Silas is stepping out of the downstairs guest bathroom.
The sight of him stops everything in me so completely that for a second it feels like my body simply forgets how to move.
It’s late enough that I had assumed everyone in the house was either gone or upstairs.
I did not expect him down here. I certainly did not expect to look up and find him in the doorway while I stand half-dressed in the kitchen, my shirt pinched away from my chest, a spoon in one hand and a tub of rocky road in the other.
He stops too.
He looks like he’s just come from either the shower or the gym or some miserable marriage of both.
His hair is damp around the temples. A hoodie hangs unzipped over his shoulders, beneath it the skin I can see is marked with fresh bruising, ugly purples and dark shadows blossoming along his ribs and lower stomach where boxing has clearly gotten more from him than usual.
One hand still has a wrap wound loosely around it, stained through in places where the blood must have seeped past whatever protection he bothered with. In the other, there’s a flask.
The flask should probably be the thing that unsettles me most.
It isn’t.
It’s the way he looks at me.