Chapter 31
Octavia
“Are you going to say anything?”
The question leaves me because the silence has gone on too long and because Maria’s face is doing that thing it only ever does when her brain is trying to outrun a truth it really, really did not expect to catch.
We’re half-hidden in the hallway outside our first class, pressed into that strange pocket of space between the bulletin board and the row of lockers where people always linger just long enough to turn private conversations into rumors if they raise their voices.
Students pass in bursts around us, bags slung over shoulders, coffee cups in hand, laughter rising and fading in currents that feel very far away from the small, charged square of air the four of us are standing in.
Maria just stares.
Her eyes move from me to Silas and back again, then land somewhere over my shoulder like maybe the wall behind us will offer a simpler explanation than the one standing right in front of her.
Cheyenne, for all her dramatics, has had a full car ride to process.
Maria has had all of thirty seconds and exactly one look at my face to realize that no, this is not some miscommunication, and no, I am not about to laugh and say got you.
“You two?” Maria asks at last.
The words come out half-breathed, half-accusation as she points between me and Silas like she needs the physical motion to keep the sentence from collapsing under the weight of what it means.
Beside me, Silas shifts just enough that the side of his shoulder nearly brushes mine.
He doesn’t touch me fully, not in a hallway packed with classmates and the possibility of eyes we don’t want, but the nearness of him feels intentional all the same.
His expression has gone flat in that way it always does when he’s bracing for judgment and bored by it at the same time.
“Happily,” he says.
The scoff in his voice does not help.
If anything, it only makes Maria’s eyes widen further, because there is no shame in him when he says it.
No awkwardness. No attempt to soften it into a mistake or a misunderstanding or one of those vague almost-relationships college students use when they’re still trying to keep a door open somewhere else.
Just happily.
Like the word itself is a challenge.
Maria’s mouth opens and closes once before she turns back to me.
The disbelief in her face is so naked that under any other circumstance I might have laughed.
She is waiting for me to save her from this.
To tell her he’s being dramatic. To tell her last night got confusing.
To tell her we kissed or almost did or crossed some vague emotional line and now everyone is overreacting.
Instead, I feel Silas’s fingers brush mine.
Only barely.
The contact is so small no one else would notice it unless they were already watching too closely, but it grounds me instantly. The warmth of him is there, real and present. For once I don’t want to hide behind half-truths. Not with them. Not anymore.
“I love him,” I say.
The words come out quieter than his did, but they land harder.
Partly because Maria believes me immediately.
Partly because the second I say them aloud in the middle of a school hallway, the whole thing becomes frighteningly real in a new way. Not just a secret. Not just a room and a set of whispered confessions made in the dark. Something I’m willing to claim in daylight.
My hand stays low at my side. His does too. Our fingers barely graze again, a touch so slight it’s almost nothing and somehow more intimate than if we’d just held hands in front of everyone.
“All of it is true,” I add.
The sentence steadies something in me.
Maria looks at me like I’ve just announced I intend to run away and join a traveling circus.
Her shock doesn’t read as cruelty. It reads as a genuine failure of imagination.
She knew I was hiding something. Knew the blowup yesterday had roots deeper than I was willing to show.
Knew Cheyenne came to pick me up this morning and came back different.
She just clearly did not think the answer would be this.
A deep breath leaves her all at once as she finally turns her head toward Cheyenne, who leans against the locker beside her with all the irritated patience of someone who hates being right in exactly this kind of situation.
“I told you,” Maria says.
The line carries equal parts triumph and accusation, as if being correct has not actually brought her any peace.
Cheyenne lets out a long, tired sigh. “I know,” she says. “Believe me, I know.”
Maria’s gaze flicks back to me, then to Silas, then back again, still visibly trying to reconcile the person she knows with the person standing in front of her.
There are too many questions in her face already.
Questions about when this started. About whether I’m okay.
About whether I’ve completely lost my mind.
About whether Silas is what he says he is, or whether I am about to get my heart handed back to me in pieces with no one left to blame but myself.
And because I know Maria, I know at least one of those questions is about Kadin.
But before she can choose which one to ask first, the hallway around us shifts. Some current of noise changes direction. A cluster of students parts farther down the hall.
The shift in Silas happens so fast I barely catch the beginning of it.
One second the four of us are still standing in that tense little pocket of hallway, Maria trying to reorder the whole shape of my life in her head while Cheyenne looks like she regrets being right and Silas stands beside me with all that dangerous stillness he wears when he’s already anticipating a problem.
The next, someone brushes past us, saying it just loud enough to be heard.
“Sister fucker.”
The words hit the air like something spat.
For half a second, no one around us seems to understand what just happened.
A few students keep walking. Someone laughs farther down the hall at a different conversation.
Maria’s face goes blank in that stunned way people’s faces do when cruelty arrives so casually it takes the brain a beat to catch up.
Silas does not need the beat.
He moves.
There is no pause. No confused glance over his shoulder.
No question of whether he heard correctly.
He turns, catching the boy by the front of his shirt, driving him backward into the lockers hard enough that the metal doors shudder.
The sound cracks down the hall, turning heads immediately.
Gasps break out in little pieces around us.
A coffee cup nearly drops somewhere to my left.
“What the fuck did you say to me?” Silas asks.
He doesn’t shout it.
That is what makes it worse.
His voice comes out vicious, each word bitten off with a control that feels one inch away from disappearing entirely.
One forearm is braced hard across the boy’s chest, pinning him there.
His fist knots in the fabric at the kid’s collar.
The boy, whoever he is, goes white with shock so fast it almost looks theatrical.
He clearly expected the insult to land and keep moving.
He did not expect to find himself slammed into a wall by the person he thought he was humiliating.
The hallway begins to slow around us.
People are turning now. Looking. Not enough to help. Just enough to witness.
Silas leans in closer, his whole body hard with the kind of anger that never needed volume to become frightening. “Say it again,” he says, quieter still. “I want to hear you be that brave with your teeth still in your mouth.”
My stomach drops.
Maria makes a noise beside me, but doesn’t move.
Cheyenne mutters something that sounds like “Jesus Christ,” under her breath.
All I can think, standing there with my pulse suddenly hammering against my ribs, is that this is exactly what the world does to boys like Silas.
It provokes, then acts surprised when all that violence finally turns outward.
The boy tries to laugh it off.
Or maybe cough. It comes out somewhere in between.
“I was just joking-”
Silas shoves him harder into the lockers, the whole row rattling with the impact.
“Does this feel funny?” he asks.
The boy’s eyes dart frantically past Silas, looking for help from the crowd now gathering, from the hall, from the authority he expected would protect him from the consequences of his own mouth. He doesn’t find any of it yet. Just faces. Curiosity. Fear. Hunger for a scene.
My body finally unfreezes.
“Silas.”
The name leaves me before I know what tone I mean to use. Pleading. Warning. I’m not even sure.
His head turns just enough that I know he heard me, but not enough to loosen his grip.
That is when the whole hallway truly goes silent.
“Easy, killer.”
Kadin’s voice cuts through the silence with that same polished sneer I’m already starting to hate on sight.
He pushes his way through the growing crowd with all the confidence of someone who knew exactly what would happen the second the insult left his friend’s mouth.
Of course he did. Of course this was him.
The little setup, the hallway audience, the cheap shot wrapped in someone else’s voice so his own hands stay clean.
“My boy was just making a joke,” he scoffs.
The phrase lands in me like acid.
Silas lets the other guy go, but not out of fear.
Out of calculation. The second his hand releases the boy’s shirt, all of that violence he had pinned into one point shifts cleanly toward Kadin instead.
He turns slowly, shoulders still tight, jaw set hard enough to make the muscle jump beneath his skin.
Kadin is smiling when he comes to a stop in front of us.
Actually smiling.