Chapter 21
Octavia
The movie hums along in the dark, all low music and sudden bursts of gore, the kind of horror film that mistakes shock for depth but still manages to keep everyone staring at the screen.
Every few minutes the room flashes red or white with some new slaughter, shadows jumping across the walls and over the faces around me.
Cheyenne and Maria are tangled together on the floor, half sprawled against one another, reacting to almost nothing.
A throat gets slit across the screen as Cheyenne reaches for more popcorn.
Someone gets dragged across tile leaving a streak of blood behind them. Maria barely blinks.
I’m not watching the movie.
Not really.
Every time I try, my attention slides sideways and lands on Silas instead.
He’s still in the rocking chair, one leg stretched out, one bent, his body arranged in that loose way that I know now is never actually loose.
The television light cuts across his face in flashes, sharpening the line of his jaw, then softening it, then throwing his eyes into darkness again.
He looks like he’s paying attention to the movie.
I know better. There’s something too still about him, too measured.
The kind of stillness that means he’s aware of every person in the room and hates at least one of them.
Kadin notices me noticing.
I feel it before I look at him. That slight shift in his attention, the way his posture changes when his curiosity sharpens into something more pointed. Dragging his eyes from the screen to me and then past me toward Silas, I already know the question is coming before he opens his mouth.
“Does it look like that in real life?”
He asks it shamelessly.
The words cut through the room in a way the movie never could.
My elbow drives into his side on instinct before I can think better of it. “Jesus, Kadin,” I hiss, horrified by the sheer stupidity of it. “You don’t ask someone that.”
The shame of it burns up my neck immediately, because of course he would ask.
Of course he would turn real violence into curiosity the second the room gave him an opening.
He doesn’t know how ugly that question sounds.
Or maybe he does and thinks honesty counts as innocence if you phrase it softly enough.
Before I can smooth over the damage, Silas answers.
“Worse, actually.”
Silas doesn’t look away from the screen when he says it. The flickering light from the movie catches one side of his face, throwing the other into shadow. The calm in his voice makes the answer land harder than if he had snapped.
“More blood,” he adds after a beat. “More pleading.”
The room goes still around the words.
Even the movie seems to shrink for a second, reduced to nothing more than fake sound effects and actors pretending they understand fear.
On the floor, Cheyenne’s hand stills halfway inside the popcorn bowl.
Maria glances from the television to Silas and then quickly away again, like she’s not sure whether looking too long would be rude or dangerous.
Kadin goes quiet beside me in a way that tells me he hadn’t expected that answer, or maybe hadn’t expected it to sound so personal.
My stomach tightens.
Because it does sound personal.
Not in the obvious way. Silas doesn’t look shaken. He doesn’t sound shaken. But I know enough now to hear the difference between his cruelty and his truth, and that wasn’t cruelty. That was something pulled from much farther down.
The movie keeps going. Some girl on screen is running through the woods, crying hard enough to make her breathing sound broken. No one in my room is watching her anymore.
Kadin clears his throat first. “Right,” he mutters, the word feeling weak the second it leaves him.
I should leave it there. Let the moment die naturally. Let the room slip back into the movie and the false safety of group noise. Instead, I hear myself say, “Can we not do this tonight?”
No one answers immediately, but Cheyenne, thankfully, recovers enough to throw Kadin a look. “Yeah,” she says. “Maybe don’t ask the ex-St. Augustine kid to compare stab wounds for fun.”
Maria elbows her lightly, but not hard enough to count as a real correction.
Silas’s mouth pulls into something that isn’t quite a smile, but definitely isn’t warmth. “It’s fine,” he says.
Somehow makes it worse.
Because it clearly isn’t.
Kadin shifts beside me, his arm brushing mine. “I wasn’t trying to be a dick,” he says, quieter now. “I just…”
He trails off, maybe because there’s no version of that sentence that doesn’t make him sound exactly like what he’s trying not to be.
“Curious?” Silas supplies.
That one word carries enough cold amusement to cut.
Kadin’s jaw tightens. “Yeah, maybe. Sorry if that’s a crime.”
The tension starts to rebuild immediately.
I can feel it in the room, that awful subtle tightening, the way everyone suddenly becomes too aware of where they are sitting and who is in the room with them. It’s ridiculous, really. A movie marathon in my bedroom shouldn’t feel like a hostage situation. And yet here we are.
Silas finally looks away from the television.
Not at Kadin first.
At me.
The glance is brief, but it carries too much.
There’s something there that makes heat creep up my neck even now, even after the text, even after the sick churn in my stomach.
Because the second his eyes catch mine, I’m aware all over again that I know the shape of his body in ways no one else in this room does.
That when he says words like pleading, blood and worse, I know what his mouth feels like when it isn’t saying ugly things just to survive the room.
He looks away before the moment can turn into something visible.
“That depends,” he says at last, his voice lower now. “Is ignorance your thing, or just tact?”
Kadin gives a dry laugh, but there’s no humor in it. “You always this pleasant?”
Silas leans back farther in the chair, the posture loose enough to be insulting. “Only when people ask stupid questions.”
Cheyenne groans under her breath. “Great. We’re doing this.”
Maria tosses a piece of popcorn at her. “Shh. This is better than the movie.”
“Maria,” I warn.
She lifts both hands in surrender, but she’s smiling.
Kadin shifts again beside me. This time I move before I can think too hard about it, enough that his shoulder no longer rests against mine. The movement is small, but I feel Silas notice it anyway.
The text message flashes through my head again so suddenly it almost makes me flinch.
Do you think death erases debt?
My phone is face down on the bedspread beside me now, screen dark, but the words are still there in my mind like they’ve been etched into it. The room feels a little too warm. The shadows from the movie feel a little too close.
Silas catches something in my face.
I know he does because his attention changes. The edge he’d been using on Kadin dulls just slightly, not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for me. His eyes stay on me a fraction longer than they should, and for one impossible second I get the sense that if we were alone, he’d ask.
But we aren’t alone.
We are trapped here with Kadin’s questions, my friends’ curiosity, and a fake killer on screen while something very real keeps scratching at the inside of my thoughts.
Kadin follows my gaze downward, probably thinking I’m looking at the movie. “You sure you’re okay?” he asks again, quieter this time.
The concern should feel nice.
Instead it lands wrong.
Because the only person in the room I want noticing that I’m not okay is the exact person I should least want involved.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Even I hear the lie in it.
Silas’s expression hardens again, not because of Kadin, not entirely. Because he hears the lie too.
On screen, the killer catches the girl in the woods, driving something into her side. Blood blooms unrealistically dark across her shirt. Cheyenne mutters, “Finally,” as Maria snorts.
No one laughs after.
The room has shifted too far.
Silas lowers his gaze back to the television, but his voice cuts through the dark a second later anyway.
“If you want to stop the movie,” he says, not looking at me, “just say so.”
The sentence is simple enough that no one else reacts to it.
But I know what he means.
He isn’t talking about the movie. He’s giving me an exit. Quietly. In front of everyone. Without making me explain.
Somehow that only makes the knot in my chest tighten more.
For a few minutes, the room tries to pretend it can recover.
The movie keeps rolling in the dark, sound rising and falling with the usual tricks, a scream here, a knife there, the glow of the television throwing pale light across my bed and the faces around it.
Cheyenne and Maria slowly begin whispering to each other again, trying to stitch normalcy back into the space one joke at a time.
Kadin stays quieter now, the careless ease he brought into the room worn down into something more cautious.
Even Silas, from where he sits in the rocking chair, looks still enough to pass for calm if you don’t know what his stillness really means.
But none of it reaches me properly.
The earlier text is still sitting under my skin, pulsing there like a fresh bruise. Debt. Death. My mother. All of it mixing together until the movie feels obscene, like some cheap performance of fear while something much uglier is trying to crawl into the room through my phone.
I don’t want to look at the screen again. Every instinct in me knows better.
But wanting and doing have never lined up especially well when fear gets involved.
My hand drifts toward the bedspread anyway, fingers finding the phone where I left it face down. The second I turn it over, the screen wakes, and another notification slides into view before I can brace myself.
This one is worse.
You still owe. Your mother’s corpse didn’t clear the balance.
For one suspended second, I stop hearing the room entirely.
It isn’t dramatic. No ringing in my ears.
No cinematic silence. Just an immediate and total narrowing of the world until all that exists is the screen in my hand and those words burning into me.
The movie keeps playing. Someone on the television is screaming.
Maria says something. Kadin shifts beside me.
The room is still there, but it has receded so far that it feels like I’m looking at it from underwater.
My stomach turns over so violently I clap a hand over my mouth before I even understand why I’m moving.
Corpse.
Not mother. Not her name. Not dead.
Corpse.
The cruelty of that word opens something in me all at once. Motel room carpet. Men counting. My mother bargaining. The old arithmetic of being made into a solution for debts that were never mine. It floods through me too fast for thought, too old for panic to stop at the surface.
This is not a prank.
Or if it is, it is one made by someone who knows exactly what shape to cut.
The room notices my movement before I notice I’m moving.
I stand too quickly, the mattress dipping and shifting beneath everyone else with enough force to finally drag a few startled looks in my direction.
My phone is still in my hand. My other hand is still over my mouth.
I know someone says my name, but the sound reaches me too late.
I can’t answer.
If I try, I’ll either start crying or throw up or both, and I’m not doing either of those things in front of Kadin, Maria, Cheyenne, or Silas, not when all four of them would wear a different expression and I’m too raw to survive any of them.
So I leave.
Not gracefully. Not with some excuse. I just move.
Past Kadin before he can get up fully. Past Maria’s immediate alarm. Past Cheyenne’s confused, “Octavia?” that follows me into the hallway. Somewhere behind me I can feel the shift in the room, the attention pulling after me in one collective, worried turn.
I don’t look back to see who stands first.
My body already knows where it’s going before my mind catches up. Straight down the hall. Past the framed family photos. Past the closed doors. Past the stupid, clean quiet of this house that has never once known how loud my past still is inside me.
I make my break for the bathroom.
The one Silas and I share by accident of architecture and bad timing.
The one place with a lock close enough to reach before my legs start shaking too hard to trust. My hand slips once on the knob because my fingers have gone numb around the phone.
Wrenching the door open anyway, I stumble inside, slamming it shut behind me with more force than I mean to.
Leaning back against it, my hand is still over my mouth, chest pulling in breaths that don’t feel like enough air, before finally letting the full weight of the message land where it was always meant to.
Not gone.
Not over.
Not paid.
And all at once, the last few years of healing feel terrifyingly fragile.