Chapter 23
Octavia
Wiping Silas off my lips with the back of my hand as I leave the bathroom, the gesture feels useless the second I do it.
It does nothing to steady me. It does nothing to erase the heat still clinging to my skin or the way my whole body is shaking from everything I let happen because I could not bear, even for a few more minutes, to be alone with my own thoughts.
The hallway feels too bright. My breathing still won’t settle.
Tears keep rising faster than I can fully stop them, blurring the edges of the house as I make my way toward my room.
I am still trying to gather myself when I push the door open.
The second I step inside, something in me drops.
Maria, Cheyenne, and Kadin are all crowded too close together, staring at a phone in Kadin’s hand with the kind of frozen attention that only ever means bad news has already entered the room and made itself at home.
No one notices me immediately. Or if they do, they are too stunned by whatever they are seeing to react the way they normally would.
A sick, sinking pressure opens in my chest.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
My voice comes out thin and shaky, smaller than I want it to be. The room feels wrong immediately, the air changed in a way that has nothing to do with the movie still playing quietly in the background. Maria is the first one to look up, the expression on her face enough to make the dread spread.
“I don’t think now is the time to…” she starts.
I don’t let her finish.
Crossing the room too quickly, I snatch the phone from Kadin’s hand before anyone can stop me.
In the same breath, I become aware of movement behind me, the quiet weight of another body in the doorway.
Silas has followed me in. I don’t turn to look at him, but I can feel him there in the way everyone else notices but tries not to.
“You look like hell,” Cheyenne says. There’s something cautious in her tone now, something almost frightened. Her eyes flick behind me toward the door, and I know she’s seeing him there too.
“He was cleaning up my vomit,” I say automatically.
The lie comes easily, almost too easily. I hate how little effort it takes to throw it into the room. No one even questions it because by then I am already looking at the phone screen.
The headline is enough.
Deborah Lancing, grave robbery.
For one second, I can’t make sense of the words. They look like language, but not my language, not my life, not something that could possibly have anything to do with me. Then my mother’s name settles into place in my mind and everything else follows in a brutal rush.
Her grave.
Her body.
Gone.
The whole room narrows at once. The walls seem farther away yet too close at the same time.
The glow from the television becomes a blur.
My heartbeat slams so hard against my ribs that it drowns out whatever else might still be happening around me.
I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing properly until my chest starts to ache.
My mother’s grave was opened.
Someone took her.
Even dead, she isn't really gone.
“Why are we worried about some woman’s grave?” Kadin asks.
He doesn’t mean it cruelly. That is somehow the worst part.
He asks with genuine confusion, from the safe distance of a person to whom this is still an article and not a hand reaching into his own history and tearing something open.
Maria and Cheyenne exchange a look immediately, both of them understanding my past enough to know that the question is wrong, even if neither of them truly understands why.
I lower the phone slowly, my hand trembling so badly the screen shakes.
“You all need to go.”
The sentence leaves me before I fully decide to say it. It isn’t loud yet. It doesn’t have to be.
Cheyenne takes a small step toward me, all worry and terrible timing. “Octavia, I don’t think…”
The anger arrives so fast it feels like the only stable thing in me.
“You don’t know what I need, Cheyenne.”
The volume of my own voice shocks all of us. The words keep coming before I can stop them, sharpened by the humiliation of being looked at while I’m unraveling.
“Stop inviting yourselves over. Stop planning things without me. Stop deciding what kind of day I’m supposed to have. I said get out.”
The silence afterward is brutal.
I see the hurt land in Cheyenne’s face immediately.
Maria flinches too, her mouth parting like she wants to say something, then thinking better of it when she sees I’m already too far gone to hear it properly.
Kadin looks confused more than wounded, caught between concern and irritation, still trying to understand what he’s stepped into and why the whole room suddenly feels so hostile.
“Octavia,” he says carefully, his hand coming to my side.
It is a small gentle touch.
Landing over one of the old scars beneath my shirt, my whole body reacts before my mind can even catch up.
I jerk away from him as if he burned me.
“Stop touching me!”
The scream tears out of me with enough force to hurt. Shoving him hard, harder than I realize I’m capable of in that moment, all the panic in the room changes shape again.
“Stop putting your hands on me,” I yell. The words come out fractured, because they are not only about him.
They are about every hand that ever landed where it wasn’t welcome.
They are about debt, my mother, grown men, childhood, the text message, and the fact that only minutes ago I had Silas in a bathroom with his hands on me and his mouth on me and his voice in my ear saying words no one should have the power to say to me so easily.
I love you.
The memory of it crashes through me all at once.
He said it without hesitation.
He said it like it meant something.
He said it while my body was still shaking for him.
That should matter.
It should.
But all at once it turns poisonous too, because men have said things to me before.
Men have promised things before. Men have wrapped themselves in tenderness before they reached for what they wanted.
People like me do not hear love the way other people hear it.
We hear danger in prettier clothes. We hear the start of a bargain.
We hear the word people use to make taking feel less ugly.
That realization hurts so badly I can barely stand upright under it.
“Get out,” I say again, but this time my voice is lower, steadier in the worst possible way. “I’m not asking again.”
No one argues after that.
Maria reaches for Cheyenne first, because Cheyenne still looks like she wants to stay and fix something that no one in this room can fix.
Kadin lingers half a second longer than the girls do, his face tight with confusion, frustration, and some lingering urge to be useful that only makes me want him gone faster.
They start toward the door.
That’s when I finally look up and see that Silas is still standing there.
He hasn’t moved.
He hasn’t said a word.
He is just there in the doorway, watching me with that unbearable, heavy stillness of his, the sight of him only making everything in me feel more exposed. The girls slip past him carefully. Kadin doesn’t take his eyes off either of us while he moves toward the hall.
Silas stays where he is.
“That means you too,” I tell him.
My voice shakes again now, the force draining out of it all at once, leaving something rawer behind.
“Don’t bother me.”
My hand drifts under my shirt without thinking, covering the scars along my stomach in a gesture so old and instinctive I don’t realize I’m doing it until I feel my own palm there.
My whole body is still trembling from what I let happen in the bathroom.
From the text. From the headline. From the fact that I let him close enough to make me forget and now I can’t tell whether that was mercy or another kind of ruin.
Silas’s jaw tightens.
He takes one step into the room.
That movement is all it takes for Kadin to stop in the hall, turning back, anger rising cleanly into his face now that he has something concrete to aim it at.
“I think she wants you to leave,” he says, voice hard. “Or am I misreading that?”
The room sharpens around the sentence.
What had been panic and shame a moment ago now has a new edge to it.
Suddenly every person in the room is standing at the edge of a very different kind of disaster.
The problem is, I think I've already fallen.