Chapter 25
Octavia
There is no hesitation in Silas.
Not a single beat of it.
The second Kadin spits those words, the second he drags my past out into the open and turns it into something filthy, Silas moves like fury is the only honest language left in the world.
I hear the first impact before I fully understand what’s happening, hear the sound of flesh meeting bone, hear Kadin stumble, hear the wall shake.
I should stop it. I know I should. But my body won’t move.
I stand there in the doorway of my room with every nerve in me locked in place, listening to violence answer violence in the only way Silas has ever trusted.
Then Kadin says something worse.
I hear it through the blood pounding in my ears.
I hear enough.
And I wish to God I didn’t.
By the time the front door slams and the house finally falls still, I feel like I’m no longer standing in my own life.
I feel split open. The article, the texts, my mother’s body stolen even in death, Kadin’s mouth spewing my past, Silas’s love in the bathroom, his hands, his voice, the way all of it keeps piling up until even breathing feels like work.
Drifting back into my room, my legs know the way even if the rest of me doesn’t.
The pencil sharpener blade is in my hand before I can decide whether I mean to pick it up.
That is the ugliest part. Not the blade.
Not the sting. The speed. The awful instinct of it.
The way my mind reaches for pain I can control when everything else feels too contaminated.
Dragging it over my arm, it’s just enough to feel it, just enough to make the world narrow for one second into something simple.
It’s fucking stupid.
I know it while I do it.
I know it as the blood wells up and starts slipping in a thin line down my forearm.
But right now it feels like the least painful thing in my life.
Standing in front of my closet mirror, I stare at myself without really seeing my face.
My hand shakes around the blade. My other hand lifts my shirt so I can look at the scars on my stomach, those old pale tally marks layered one over another like somebody once decided my body was a ledger and never stopped keeping count.
Every line is a memory I do not want. Every line is a hand, a smell, a weight, a bargain I never made and still had to pay for.
The article.
The texts.
Do the dead never really die?
Do they just keep finding ways to drag themselves back through the living?
And then, because my mind is cruel or because I am weak in all the places that matter, I think of Silas. Of his mouth. Of his hands. Of those three words. Of the way he said them like they were heavier than his own body and still gave them to me anyway.
I love you.
The words are still inside me like a fever.
But men lie.
Men use.
Men say the most beautiful things in the world while they are taking what they want.
So what does that make him?
What does that make me for wanting to believe him anyway?
The hand on my wrist comes fast enough to rip me out of the spiral.
Gasping, I look down first, because all I see is blood.
His bloodied knuckles wrapped around my wrist. My blood smeared across his skin.
Then I lift my eyes to the mirror, seeing him there behind me, his face furious and bewildered all at once, his breathing still ragged from dragging Kadin out of this house.
“Octavia,” he whispers.
My name sounds wrecked in his mouth.
“What the hell are you doing?”
I can’t answer the question he’s asking.
Because the real answer is too humiliating.
My gaze drops to my stomach in the mirror. To the old lines there.
“It’s your turn,” I hear myself say.
The words sound empty even to me.
His expression changes instantly. Shock first. Then horror.
“To add your tally to the roster,” I whisper. “One line for getting the damaged one.”
Something in him snaps at that.
He moves around me so quickly that he blocks my view of the mirror entirely, cutting me off from my own reflection as if he cannot bear to let me look at myself while I say things like that.
He tears the blade from my hand so hard I know it cuts him too, because fresh blood spills immediately across his palm.
He doesn’t react to it at all. His whole body is fixed on the shallow cut on my arm.
He catches my forearm carefully, almost reverently, pressing his hand over the blood.
“The men,” he starts. His voice is shaking now, really shaking. “The men your mother brought around you…”
“Debt,” I whisper.
The word tastes rotten.
“Each scar…” My throat closes around it. I force it out anyway. “Like a name in a guest book.”
The second I say it, his entire face changes.
I have seen Silas angry. I have seen him jealous, violent, hungry…
even cut open with grief. This is something else.
This is fury so deep it looks holy. Not the kind that wants to break something because it is easier than feeling.
The kind that wants to go backward in time and slaughter everyone who ever made me think of myself this way.
His hand stays over the cut on my arm. The bleeding is already slowing, but he keeps it there like he’s trying to stop something bigger than blood.
“You didn’t mean what you said,” I whisper, because I have to hurt myself with it before he can. “Kadin is right about one thing. I am damaged. Inside and out.”
Silas shakes his head before I even finish.
Not slowly. Not thoughtfully. Immediately. Violently. As if the words themselves offend him.
When he speaks, his voice comes out unsteady in a way I almost never hear from him.
“Don’t you dare,” he says, the force of it rooting me where I stand. His voice is rough, furious, full of a kind of devotion that feels almost violent in its certainty. “Don’t you dare let him use your pain to tell you what you are.”
Reaching for the hem of his shirt, he pulls it over his head in one sharp, impatient motion, the fabric dropping from his body.
Even though I know this body, even though I have touched these scars with my own hands and mouth while learning them in the dark, the sight of him like this still steals the breath from me.
I know what he carries.
But knowing is not the same thing as seeing him offer it up like this.
Not as seduction. Not as vulnerability for its own sake. As evidence. As truth. As if he is laying his whole body bare in front of me and saying, look at what was done to me and tell me again that damage is all we are.
The cigarette burns hide beneath the trees on his arms. Cuts cross his chest and stomach, some pale and silvered with age, some thicker and uglier, each one a line in a language I understand too well now.
His own guest book. His own roster. His own body turned into something a man used to leave his name behind on.
Staring at him, I feel my whole chest cave inward.
“My father,” he whispers. There is no poetry in it, no distance, no attempt to make it easier to hear. “That’s what he made me. A thing to burn. A thing to cut. A place to put his rage when it got too heavy to hold inside himself.”
Taking one step closer, his hands are trembling.
“The burns on my arms,” he says. “The cuts on my body. Every mark he left because he needed something weaker than him to make him feel like a man.”
My eyes sting harder. I can’t look away from him.
He is beautiful, ruined, furious...human in a way that hurts to witness.
“If the world wants to hurt the damaged,” he says, voice breaking at the edges, “then cut me.”
The words strike so deep I can barely stay upright.
“Want to carve names into somebody?” he says. “Use me. Want to mark the ruined? Fine. Mark me. But don’t you stand here and help them finish what they started.”
My breath catches on a sob.
Letting his shirt fall, his bloody hands come to my face.
Cupping me so carefully it almost destroys me, blood smears warm across my skin, his thumbs trembling at my cheeks. He leans in close enough that our foreheads nearly touch, his breathing hard, his rage, love, and fear so tightly wound together I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.
“If loving you means I have to prove it in blood, I will,” he says.
The sentence is not dramatic in his mouth. It is not a line. It is a vow.
“If killing every bad thing left in your life is what I have to do, I will.”
I should be afraid of how much he means it.
Instead I feel something in me break open.
Because he is not speaking like a boy trying to impress me. He is speaking like someone who has finally found one sacred thing and decided the rest of the world can choke on its teeth if it comes too close.
Tipping my face up more firmly, he forces my eyes to his.
“Look at me,” he whispers, and I do.
His eyes are blazing. Not only with fury. With grief. With devotion. With the terrible restraint of someone who wants to burn the world down and touch me gently at the same time.
“I am not here because I pity you. I am not saying this because I got under your skin and don’t know how to get out. I am saying this because every ugly thing in my life still led me to you.”
My lips part, but no sound comes.
He leans closer, his voice dropping, every word weighted with emotion so heavy it feels like it could drag both of us under.
“You are not debt,” he says. “You are not a tally. You are not what they took from you. You are not what your mother sold. You are not the sum of every hand that touched you wrong.”
Tears spill over before I can stop them.
His thumbs catch them, spreading them across my skin like they matter too.
“And if I have to spend the rest of my life tearing those lies out of you one by one,” he whispers, “then I will.”
I am crying openly now, not quietly, not prettily, but the kind of crying that shakes through bone because something inside you has finally been struck in the exact place it has been rotting for years.
Silas sees all of it.
He sees the the terror of wanting to believe him.