Chapter 27
Octavia
“When did you get this?”
Silas’s voice is low when he asks it, roughened by everything we just did and everything neither of us has fully come down from yet.
He finishes another bottle of water as he speaks, the plastic crackling softly in his hand before he drops it on the counter beside the first. Somewhere behind us, the dryer rumbles on, my sheets tumbling inside with slow, heavy thuds, cleaning evidence that feels far too intimate to reduce to laundry.
Sitting on the kitchen counter in his shirt and fuzzy pajama pants, my bare feet brush the cabinet doors every now and then when my legs tremble too hard to keep still.
My whole body still feels unsteady in the aftermath of him.
My skin is oversensitive. My mouth still remembers his.
My heartbeat still hasn’t decided whether it’s calming down or simply learning to live at this pace now that I know what it feels like to be loved and wrecked by the same pair of hands.
His thumb moves absently against my thigh while he studies my phone.
That gentle little motion undoes me almost more than everything upstairs did.
Because only an hour ago, those same hands had me shaking apart beneath him.
Those same fingers had traced me like I was not something damaged and survived, but something precious and wanted.
Afterward, I laid on his chest for what felt like forever, listening to his heart knock steadily beneath my ear while his hand moved through my hair with a tenderness so patient it made me ache in places that had nothing to do with my body.
There was no lying to him after that.
No shrinking the truth down into something manageable.
When he finally asked what was on my phone, what had me so pale before everything between us broke open, I couldn’t make myself feed him some smaller version of it. Not after the way we had just given everything else to each other.
So now we’re here.
Him half-dressed in a hoodie he threw on to cover the scratches and bite marks I left all over his torso.
Me in his clothes, smelling like him, wearing concealer over the bruises on my neck like that somehow makes them less real.
The kitchen light is too bright for how raw I still feel, but I don’t move away from him.
I lean into his shoulder instead, because that seems to be what my body does now whenever it’s given the chance.
He has my phone in one hand, his eyes narrowed at the screen.
I can’t stop looking at the marks I left on him.
The edge of his hoodie has slipped enough that I can see faint crescents from my nails high on his chest, little red half-moons scattered over skin I now know in humiliating detail.
The sight of them sends a slow pulse of heat through me even now, right alongside the fear.
I tug the hoodie down for him without thinking, smoothing it over the evidence.
Noticing the gesture, he doesn’t comment on it.
Letting his free hand leave my thigh, it settles at the small of my back instead, anchoring me there against him.
“While everyone was over,” I whisper. “The first one came while everyone was over. And then the article about my mom’s grave…” I trail off, because even now saying it aloud makes it feel unreal in the wrong way. “None of this feels like some cruel prank. It feels…” I swallow. “Planned.”
His hand moves slowly over my back, not soothing exactly, but steady enough to keep me from floating too far into panic again. He reads the texts in silence for another second, the line of his mouth going harder with every passing beat.
“She was buried in Spokehaven?” he asks.
“It was the closest cemetery,” I mutter.
The answer sounds absurdly practical. As if proximity and convenience have any place in a conversation about a stolen body and debts that keep crawling out of the dark.
Before he can say anything else, another text flashes across the screen.
My mom.
Running late. Open house. Dad is caught up in a meeting. You and Silas don’t need to wait up for dinner.
The normalcy of it almost makes me laugh.
Or cry. I can’t tell which. The message lands in the middle of all this like a postcard from a different life, one where parents run late and daughters wait up and nobody in the house is sitting on a counter in a boy’s shirt while he reads threats off her phone with blood still drying under his nails.
Then another text slides in.
Cheyenne.
Hey. I know you’re clearly going through something, and I hope Kadin is wrong in thinking it’s about Silas. Just know who your real friends are. I will always be here for you.
The guilt hits immediately.
Heavy, I immediately drop my eyes from the screen.
Cheyenne’s hurt from earlier is still fresh enough that the words feel deserved and undeserved all at once.
She’s trying to reach me. To make herself the safe option again, yet, buried inside that kindness is Kadin, still moving pieces around from outside the room.
Silas sees it too.
His whole body stills in that dangerous way I’m beginning to understand means anger has sharpened into something colder. His eyes lock on the message, the hand on my back pausing for half a second before resuming its slow, measured path.
“Little fucker knew exactly what he was doing,” he murmurs.
The words come out with no heat in them.
That makes them so much worse.
Looking at him, really looking at him, I see the fury sitting just under his skin.
Not loud. Not wild. Focused. Kadin didn’t just leave bruises in the hallway and a threat at the bottom of the stairs.
He left poison behind, and he did it knowing exactly where it would spread.
Through my friends. Through doubt. Through timing.
Through the simple, devastating fact that if he can make the people who love me question Silas, he doesn’t have to be near me to keep causing damage.
Silas knows that.
And now so do I.
Brushing his thumb once over the side of my ribs through the shirt, he pulls me a little closer against him.
The movement is subtle, almost absentminded, but there is something possessive in the way his arm tightens around my back afterward, as if the act of reading those messages has made him freshly aware of how many things are still reaching for me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for anymore. For the texts. For the panic. For Cheyenne. For dragging him into this. For how quickly my life turns into something ugly enough to splash onto everyone near it.
His head turns toward me immediately.
“No,” he snaps. There is so much certainty in that one word it almost hurts. “None of this is yours to be sorry for.”
The dryer thumps behind us, my phone sitting dark in his hand now.
Even with the fear returning, even with the texts, the grave, and the ugly shape of whatever this is becoming, I can still feel the echo of his heartbeat under my ear from upstairs, still hear the way he said he loved me like it was the only thing in his life he had never lied about.
That is the problem with love, I think.
Once it becomes real, even fear has to make room for it.
Silas exhales slowly.
“Who would she still owe?”
The question is quiet, but it lands hard.
I don’t answer right away because the answer is not a list. It is not a theory. It is not even fully a thought. It is a face.
One face rises up so quickly…so vividly…
that I feel the old terror before I remember his name.
Tall. Heavy hands. Breath that always smelled like stale beer and mint.
The man who left the most marks. The one whose tally lines had taken the longest to fade.
The one who used to smile at my mother like he was doing her a kindness while he carved himself into my body deeper than the others ever did.
My stomach turns.
Silas feels the shift in me immediately, his arm tightening almost immediately.
“There is someone,” he says.
It isn’t really a question. He reads enough in my face to know.
I nod once, then wish I hadn’t because even that tiny confirmation makes it more real. “One of them,” I whisper. “More than the others. He…” My mouth goes dry. “He left the most.”
The words sound ugly, but Silas understands them anyway. His jaw sets so hard I can see the muscle jump beneath his skin. He is trying, visibly, not to let his anger outrun the moment. I know the effort it takes because I can feel it in the way his body goes still against mine.
Before either of us can say more, his phone starts ringing.
The sound cuts through the room sharply enough to make me flinch. Pulling his own phone from his pocket with visible irritation, he glances at the screen, answering without bothering to hide the annoyance in his face.
“Yeah?”
The voice on the other end is loud enough that I hear it immediately.
The Warden.
Even through the tinny speaker, his voice carries the same oily authority it always has, the same tone men like him use when they think possession and discipline are the same thing.
“Care to explain to me,” he says, “a certain party you were at where a kid overdosed?”
Silas scowls at the phone, the look on his face turning his whole body harder.
“I wasn’t involved.”
“That’s not what the owners of the house are saying.” There is a pause, loaded enough to feel like a smirk. “The Andersons are saying you provided the drugs.”
For one beat, the room goes completely still.
Then my hand shoots out.
Taking the phone from Silas before he can stop me, his surprise flashes across his face, but by then I already have the device pressed to my ear, anger hitting so fast it burns clean through the fear for the first time all night.
“Are you out of your goddamn mind?”
The silence on the other end is brief.
Then the Warden says my name carefully, like he is already trying to place how much trouble this call just became.
I do not let him.
“You don’t get to call this house and throw around accusations when you have no idea what happened,” I snap. “Silas was trying to help that boy while everyone else stood there panicking.”
“Miss Marrow,” he begins in that infuriatingly calm voice, “I am simply relaying what has been reported to-”
“No,” I cut in. “You are doing what men like you always do. You found the easiest person to blame and decided that was enough.”
Silas is staring at me now. Not interrupting. Not reaching for the phone. Just watching with a kind of stunned intensity that would rattle me under other circumstances. Right now it only fuels me.
“The Andersons can say whatever they want to save themselves from looking negligent,” I continue. “But if you think for one second Silas had anything to do with those drugs, you’re a bigger idiot than I thought.”
The Warden’s voice hardens. “You would do well to watch your tone.”
My laugh comes out sharp.
“You would do well to stop calling a traumatized kid every time there’s a problem and assuming he caused it.”
That lands. I can hear it in the tiny pause that follows.
“You seem very defensive of him,” he says at last, the insinuation in it making my grip tighten on the phone.
“Yes,” I say flatly. “Because unlike you, I was there.”
The dryer thumps behind us. Silas still hasn’t moved. He looks furious, but not at me. At the call. At the accusation. At the fact that even here, even now, the past keeps reaching for him in the exact same shape.
“If you want the truth,” I say, each word careful now, “the truth is that Silas was one of the only people at that party who acted like a human being. So if your next move is to punish him because rich parents need a convenient villain, you can expect my parents to hear about it. In detail.”
The Warden goes quiet again.
This silence is longer.
When he speaks, the smoothness is back, but it has thinned. “I will, of course, be following up through proper channels.”
“Do that,” I snap. “The next time you want to accuse him of something, maybe gather facts before you call.”
I end the call before he can answer.
The kitchen is suddenly very quiet.
Lowering the phone slowly, handing it back to Silas, my chest is rising too fast, adrenaline still climbing through me, but the fear has changed shape again. For the first time tonight it feels less like drowning and more like standing up inside the wave.
Silas takes the phone without looking away from me.
For a second neither of us says anything.
Then, very quietly, he asks, “Why’d you do that?”
Because I know what it’s like to have men tell lies about what happened to your body and call it truth.
Because I am tired of watching the world use your past as evidence against your future.
Because somewhere between the bathroom, the blood, the confession and now, your fight has become mine.
I don’t say any of that.
I just look at him, answering the truest version I can manage.
“Because they were wrong.”
Silas’s eyes drift toward the living room, past the kitchen island and the soft yellow lamp still glowing near the couch. For the first time all night something almost boyish touches his face.
It starts small.
Just the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth, the beginning of a smile he doesn’t seem to mean to let me see. After everything, after blood, texts, fear, and the Warden’s voice in my ear, that small curve of warmth feels almost more intimate than the things we did upstairs.
“You want to watch a proper movie?” he asks.
His voice is quieter now, rough still, but the edge has softened. The fury in him hasn’t vanished. I can still feel it there, banked low under the surface, still hot from everything that happened. But for this one moment he lets it sit beside something gentler.
Glancing back at me, his smile deepens just enough to make my chest ache.
“Because if I keep focusing on you,” he whispers, “I think I’m going to carry you right back upstairs…Steph and Jacob do not need another problem tonight.”
The sentence should make me laugh.
Instead it makes heat bloom through me all over again, because I know he means it. Not as a tease. As fact. His restraint is a living thing tonight. I can feel how thin it is every time his eyes rest on my mouth for too long.
Leaning toward him before I can overthink it, I kiss him once.
Just once.
A small kiss. Gentle. Meant more as an answer than an invitation, though the way he exhales against my lips tells me it still lands like one. When I pull back, I stay close enough to feel his breath brush my skin.
“I’d love that,” I whisper.
As I look at him there in the kitchen light, blood still faintly dried along his knuckles, scars hidden under a hoodie, love and violence all somehow living in the same body, only one thought remains.
How could something so gentle have been forced into such a violent life.