Chapter 17
Octavia
Idon’t remember crossing the hallway.
One second I’m in the kitchen with melted ice cream soaking through my tank top, my pulse hammering against the inside of my ribs while Kadin’s voice keeps asking if I’m still there, and the next I’m at Silas’s door, pounding on it hard enough that my knuckles sting.
The call ended seconds ago, but it doesn’t feel over.
Nothing feels over. My skin is still hot where his fingers slid through my hair.
My body is still lit up in all the wrong places, aching with a need I am too angry to name properly.
Every emotion in me has bled together so completely that I can’t separate humiliation from desire or rage from want.
I only know I cannot sit with it by myself.
So I knock again.
And again.
The door opens so suddenly I nearly fall into him.
My hands slap flat against his bare chest before either of us can stop it.
The contact shocks a breath out of me. His skin is warm, warmer than it should be, and I feel everything all at once.
The hard line of muscle. The uneven ridges of scars.
The steady rise of his breathing under my palms. For one brief, sickening second, I just stand there touching him like I’ve been trying to get back to this exact point all night.
Then I shove myself off him.
The force of it is more for me than for him.
Taking a step back, I force myself to look anywhere but lower, because his sweats are hanging off his hips in that lazy, careless way that should not matter and does.
The tattoo he keeps hidden from me curls darkly along his lower stomach, vanishing beneath the waistband before my eyes can make enough of it.
I hate that I notice it. I hate that even now, furious and humiliated, part of me still wants to know what the rest of it looks like.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
His voice is thick with alcohol, but not sloppy. It’s worse than that. Controlled enough to sound intentional. As if he has all the time in the world to stand there half-naked in the doorway and pretend he doesn’t know exactly what he did to me downstairs.
He has to be joking.
He has to be, because the alternative is that he really is capable of touching me like that and then looking at me as if I’m the one who showed up uninvited.
“Where do you get off?” I ask. The words come out shaking harder than I want them to.
The second I hear my own voice, memory starts bleeding into the present.
Not just the kitchen. Not just the car. Older things.
Other men. Other hands. The old, nauseating feeling of being watched, handled, weighed for what could be taken.
For one awful second, all of that rises to the surface at once.
Am I just another body to him?
Just another body a man can press his hunger into and call it need?
My eyes flick up, catching the mirror leaning against the wall behind him. In it, I can see the ruined angles of him from the side, the broad spread of his shoulders, the dark edge of Medusa on his back, and that thought stumbles.
No.
Not because he’s harmless.
Because whatever he is doing to me, whatever this is, it is not simple. And that ruins everything.
At the very least, I know this much: I am not the only person in this room who understands what it means to lose ownership of your own skin.
“Don’t you have a phone call you’re supposed to be tending to?” he asks.
There’s a scoff in it. A challenge. A little contempt. He is trying to push me back toward anger because anger is easier than whatever this really is.
“What is wrong with you?” I fire back. The question tears out of me before I can soften it. “You spend weeks pretending I don’t exist, and then you think you can just come downstairs and touch me like that because what? Because you heard Kadin on the phone and suddenly got insecure?”
His mouth curves, but there’s nothing warm in it.
“Insecure?” he repeats, then, he actually laughs.
That laugh makes something in me snap tighter.
“You think I’m threatened by that little prick?”
He steps closer when he says it, not fast, not aggressive, just enough to make me step back without meaning to. I hate that he notices. I hate that I notice him noticing.
“Given the disgusting little claim you laid on me in that kitchen,” I say, trying to steady my breathing and failing, “yes. That’s exactly what I think.”
He tilts his head slightly, studying me with a focus that feels far too intimate for a fight.
“Did you stop me?”
The question lands low and ugly.
I stare at him.
His voice drops with the next step he takes. By the time he speaks again, the space between us has narrowed to something dangerous.
“Did you stop me,” he asks, “while he sat there on the phone listening to you come apart in my hands?”
Heat slams into me so fast it burns.
I shove him.
Or try to.
His hands catch my wrists immediately as the whole fight suddenly changes shape.
My palms never make it to his chest this time.
He traps me before I can put force behind it, his grip tightening just enough to stop me, not enough to hurt, though the restraint itself still sends panic and heat through me in the same breath.
“You’re drunk,” I hiss, because I need that to be the reason. “All you ever do is touch me when you’re drunk.”
The words leave me sharper than I expect. I realize too late that I sound almost wounded.
That does something to his face.
The sarcasm thins. The cruelty doesn’t disappear, but it shifts, revealing something rawer underneath. He looks tired for a second. Not sleepy. Soul-tired. The kind of tired that comes from carrying yourself like a weapon for too long.
“The liquor doesn’t make me want you,” he says quietly.
The sentence cuts through me because it isn’t what I expected.
His grip changes. Not gone. Changed.
He guides my wrists down slowly until my palms land flat against his chest. Against the scarred skin there. Against the hard, damaged heat of him.
He winces when my hands settle.
It’s small, but I feel it. A hitch in his breath. A brief tightening in the muscles under my palms. The contact hurts him in ways I can’t see.
“It makes me forget how afraid I am of it,” he says.
I stop fighting.
Not because I forgive him. Not because the anger leaves. But because suddenly I can feel his heartbeat against my hands, hard and uneven. There is too much truth in the room for me to keep pretending this is only about rage.
He looks at me like he hates himself for saying any of this and can’t stop now that he’s started.
“It makes me remember,” he continues, voice lower now, “that when you touch me, you’re not trying to take.”
My throat tightens.
His eyes move over my face, searching for something, maybe punishment, maybe mercy.
“There’s no hatred in your eyes when your hands are on me,” he says. “Even now. Even now, when you should hate me.”
The words hit harder than any insult could have.
Because I probably should hate him.
For the car. For the kitchen. For the silence. For the way he keeps slicing me open with honesty only after he’s already hurt me. For the fact that every time I get close to deciding he is monstrous, he says something that makes the monster look too much like a wound.
My fingers curl instinctively against his chest. Not enough to hurt him. Just enough to prove that I’m still there, still touching him, even after everything.
And that seems to undo him more than if I’d slapped him.
His lashes lower for a second. His mouth parts slightly, not in seduction this time, but in the kind of breathless disbelief that makes him look younger. Less dangerous. More lost.
The room is silent except for both of us breathing too hard.
When he speaks again, the words come slowly, as if he’s dragging them out against his own will.
“This would all be so much easier,” he says, “if you looked at me the way other people do.”
I don’t say anything.
His hands are still around my wrists, but gently now, almost reverently, as if he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he lets go too fast.
“If you looked at me like a body to use,” he continues, the grief in his voice so quiet, it almost doesn’t sound like grief at all, “maybe I could survive that. Maybe I’d know what to do with that.”
His jaw tightens. I can feel the effort it takes for him to keep saying this.
“But you don’t.”
The sentence lands between us like something breakable.
He swallows hard. His eyes stay on mine.
“You look at me like there’s still a person under all of this,” he says, and for the first time all night, his voice sounds close to breaking. “And that’s what makes this impossible.”
My whole body stills.
Because beneath the alcohol and the anger and the wanting, that is the truth of it, isn’t it? Not that he touched me. Not that I wanted him to. Not that I’m standing here in his room with my hands on his chest while my heart tries to beat its way out of me.
It’s that he knows I see him.
And that he doesn’t know whether to run from that or ruin it before I can.
His gaze drops briefly to my mouth, then rises again, heavy with a kind of restraint that feels more intimate than a kiss would have.
“Maybe then,” he says quietly, “we wouldn’t still be standing here trying to pretend this is only hunger.”
The worst part is that I can’t tell whether the ache in my chest is from anger, pity, or the terrifying possibility that he’s right.
His hands loosen around my wrists first.
Not all at once. Not like surrender. Like a decision being made in pieces.
The pressure of his fingers eases, then shifts, sliding slowly up my arms until his palms leave my skin entirely for one unbearable second.
The loss of contact makes my whole body feel suddenly too aware of itself, too aware of the inches between us, too aware of the fact that I am still standing here when every instinct I’ve ever trusted should have sent me running.
Then his hands rise to my face.