Chapter 24
Silas
Imeant it.
That is the thought that keeps circling, stripping itself down to bone every time it comes back.
Not a drunken exaggeration. Not heat speaking in a borrowed language.
Not some convenient lie born in a bathroom full of steam and bad decisions.
I meant every fucking word, and now I’m stuck sitting in the aftermath of that truth while the house settles around me like nothing permanent has just happened inside it.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I listen.
The wall between our rooms is thin enough that I can hear the shape of her grief without hearing every detail of it.
A muffled sound. A broken breath. The soft, ruined kind of crying people do when they’re trying not to let anyone hear them at all.
Every time it reaches me, my whole body tenses with the need to get up, cross the hall, knock on her door, and do something useful with my hands for once.
I don’t move.
Because I know exactly what I am capable of doing to her when I’m trying to comfort her and fail.
That is the part I can’t stop replaying.
Not just what happened in the bathroom, but what should have happened.
She had come to me half-shattered, her body desperate to outrun whatever memory or terror had grabbed her by the throat.
I should have knelt in front of her and taken the phone from her shaking hand.
I should have made her sit on the floor and breathe.
I should have held her face and told her she was safe and left it there.
Instead, I let her look up at me from the floor with that need in her eyes and lose every clean instinct I had.
The guilt of it should be enough to flatten the rest.
It isn’t.
That’s what makes me sick.
Because underneath the guilt is still the memory of her mouth, her hands, the way she wanted me to stop her from thinking and chose me to do it.
Underneath the horror of my own weakness is the brutal, living fact that she came to me.
Not Kadin. Not her friends. Me. And some traitorous, selfish part of me still glows with that even now while she cries on the other side of the wall because of things I should have protected her from instead of adding myself to the pile.
Then there’s the phone.
I saw enough of Kadin's screen when she bolted from the room to know the article was about her mother’s grave, but that wasn’t what sent her running to me.
That look on her face had been too immediate, too personal, too poisoned.
Something else was on her phone. Something worse.
Something that hit old wounds hard enough to crack her wide open in front of all of us.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
What did she read?
What the hell was on that screen that sent her spiraling so fast and made her ask for me the way she did?
I’m still trying to decide whether I should ignore the instinct to go to her or surrender to it when a voice grates through the room and kills the silence.
“You look like shit.”
I look up sharply.
Kadin is leaning in my doorway with one shoulder against the frame, posture loose in the practiced way of a man trying to look more comfortable than he really is.
The hallway light cuts around him, flattening the expression on his face into something hard and ugly.
He shouldn’t be here. He should have taken his hurt feelings and his bullshit concern and gone home with the girls.
Instead he’s standing in my doorway, looking at me like he came back for something.
That alone is enough to taint the air in the room.
“Hoping she’d let you stay?” he asks.
The question isn’t curious. It’s bait. He says it with that low, dry edge men use when they think they’re finally seeing the truth and can’t wait to press on it.
There’s no concern left in him now. No clean politeness for the family downstairs.
No careful pretense. Just hostility dressed in control.
“Get the fuck out,” I snap at him.
My voice stays low. That’s probably what makes him decide to keep pushing.
He peels himself off the doorframe, walking into the room like I didn’t say anything, like the boundary means nothing because he’s already decided he’s morally superior enough to ignore it.
“The girls are gone,” he says, glancing once toward the wall that separates my room from hers.
“I’m sure that’s going to sting tomorrow. ”
The comment lands where it was meant to. He wants me thinking about her. About what happened. About what she’ll feel in the morning. As if I haven’t already been drowning in exactly that.
I stand.
It isn’t a decision so much as an inevitability.
My body is moving before I fully catch up to the fact of it, and Kadin notices fast enough to lift a hand to my chest as I cross the room.
The contact is less about stopping me than it is about making a point, about showing me he isn’t intimidated enough to back away.
“Careful,” he says. The calm in his voice is thin now, stretched over something more brittle. He leans in slightly, dragging in a breath through his nose. “You smell like her.”
That sentence does something ugly to the room.
For one beat, the only thing I feel is the recognition of it.
He’s right. Of course he’s right. Her is still all over me.
Her soap, our skin, the warmth of the bathroom and the rawness of what we did and didn’t say afterward.
Her body under my hands before her mouth opened for me when she should have pushed me away.
The smart thing would be silence.
I don’t choose the smart thing.
“Pity,” I say softly. “I’m sure you’d love to know what she tastes like too.”
The words hit him cleanly.
His face changes all at once, not in shock exactly, but in the furious recalibration of someone who had suspected something ugly and just got handed confirmation in the filthiest possible language. Whatever restraint he walked in here wearing starts to crack around the edges.
“Jesus Christ,” he scoffs. There’s no pretense left now. “You can’t even hide it.”
I say nothing.
That silence is what pushes him over.
“How long?” he asks. “How long have you been using this placement to take advantage of her?”
The accusation tears through me with surgical precision.
It is not just insulting. It is aimed. He found the one angle sharp enough to cut through anger and go straight for the place in me that was already questioning everything.
Suddenly I can hear all the ugliest versions of myself at once.
The boy from St. Augustine. The man’s son.
The houseguest who came into her life already carrying old damage between them and still let it become want.
The thing in me that should have known better and didn’t stop anyway.
For a fraction of a second, I don’t move.
The rage that follows isn’t explosive. It’s colder than that..much worse.
By the time Kadin realizes what he’s done, it has already reached my hands.
Catching the front of his shirt in both fists, I drive him backward so hard the wall shakes behind him.
The force slams the breath out of him in one stunned sound.
My forearm comes up across his chest before he can recover, pinning him there, crowding him hard enough that whatever easy, upright confidence he came in wearing finally fractures for real.
The room goes silent except for both of us breathing.
Up close, I can see the moment his bravado fails him.
Not all at once. Just the small betrayals.
The jump in his pulse at the base of his throat.
The way his hands come up too late, not to fight me yet, but to gauge whether I mean to hit him or choke him or simply hold him there until the threat sinks in.
The fact that he is finally looking at me the way he should have from the beginning.
Keeping him pinned, I lean in until he has no choice but to hear every word clearly.
“You don’t get to say that to me,” I whisper.
He swallows hard, trying to gather himself enough to sneer, but I can feel the uncertainty in him now. He wants to be righteous. He wants to believe he’s the good guy in this room. But good men don’t usually end up held against walls by the throats of their own assumptions.
“You think you know what happened,” I hiss. “You think reading a few records and seeing her flinch gives you some right to stand here and tell me what I am to her.”
His jaw tightens. “I know enough.”
“No,” I say, pressing harder just long enough to make the point land. “You know what you needed to know to make yourself feel clean.”
That hits. I can tell by the way his face flashes with something that looks almost like anger but is really embarrassment caught before it can turn into anything useful.
“She doesn’t need-” he starts.
Cutting him off, I tighten my grip on his shirt.
“You don’t get to talk about what she needs,” I warn. “Not to me.”
I can hear my own pulse now. Feel it in my teeth. In my hands. In the violent restraint it takes not to go farther.
Because I could.
That’s the truth of it. The terrifying one. I could cave his mouth in. Break his nose. Put him on the floor and teach him exactly how little those records prepared him for a boy like me. The knowledge lives in my body as naturally as breathing.
And the fact that I’m aware of it at all makes his accusation sting all over again.
So I hold him there.
Not out of mercy.
Out of calculation.
Out of the last, brutal thread of self-control I still possess.
He sees that too. I can feel him understanding, little by little, that the most frightening thing in the room isn’t the violence. It’s the effort it’s taking not to use it.
Still, beneath the fear finally working its way into his face, there is defiance.
Kadin should stop here.