Chapter 34 #2
For the briefest second, something flickers across my father’s face. Not shock. Not approval. Recognition, maybe. A tiny, private acknowledgment that passes too quickly for me to name. It unsettles me because I do not understand it, because it feels like a piece of a conversation I was not part of.
My mother, thankfully, has no interest in letting the Warden steer this into his version of events.
“What exactly are you trying to imply?” she asks, the edge in her voice is no longer hidden. “That what? My kids are involved with one another?”
The Warden’s eyes move between Silas and me with an infuriating calm look. He takes in our proximity, the tension in our shoulders, the silence hanging between us, all of it. If he notices how quickly my pulse changes under his gaze, he keeps that to himself.
“That is one of the claims that was made,” he says.
The words are barely out before Silas mutters, low enough that only I catch it at first, “I’m going to kill him.”
A fresh spike of dread moves through me, because I know without asking that he means Kadin.
Not as some dramatic figure of speech. Not as a joke. The threat sits in his voice with too much sincerity to dismiss.
Silas takes one step toward the table.
It isn’t rushed. That is what makes it frightening. There is no wildness in the movement, no reckless lunge that could be dismissed as temper. Just one deliberate step, the kind a person takes when he has already chosen violence in his head.
Before he can take another, my father speaks.
“If anything was going on, I’d know.”
The sentence cuts through the kitchen cleanly enough that even Silas stops.
My father’s voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t need to. He sits there with one hand still on the table, coffee gone cold inside the Warden’s cup, his whole body arranged with the kind of stillness that only ever means someone dangerous has finally gotten tired of pretending to be agreeable.
“I did my research after Kadin stepped foot in my house,” he continues. “The Andersons have done their fair share of donations to local law enforcement to cover up their son’s reckless behavior. St. Augustine, from what I can tell, has never exactly been in the habit of turning down a handout.”
The Warden shifts subtly.
It is the first crack I’ve seen in him since we came inside.
My father notices it too.
“So before you come into my house,” he says, anger in every word, “hurling accusations and threatening MY kids, I’d advise you to tread very carefully.”
The room goes so quiet I can hear the little hum of the refrigerator behind my mother.
My father’s gaze doesn’t leave the Warden’s face.
“I am a kind man,” he says. “That does not mean I don’t know how to be cruel.”
The sentence lands like a knife laid flat across the table.
Beside me, Silas goes still. Not calmer. Just arrested mid-motion by the force of it. Whatever he was about to do, whatever was already gathering in him, my father’s voice reaches it, stopping it dead in its tracks.
For the first time since I’ve known him, the Warden looks unsure.
Not afraid. He’s too proud for that to show fully. But uncertain enough that it almost feels like blood in the water. His fingers tighten once around the handle of his coffee mug before he lets go of it entirely.
My father leans back only slightly.
“Get out of my house.”
No one speaks for a second.
Then the Warden stands.
There is a hesitation in it, tiny but undeniable, as if he is still deciding whether dignity can be salvaged on the way out.
His eyes pass over my mother first, then to me, then finally to Silas.
What unsettles me most is the look in them.
Not outrage. Calculation. As if leaving this room does not mean surrender so much as postponement.
He steps around the table.
The kitchen feels smaller as he moves past us, the whole house holding its breath. When he draws level with me and Silas, he slows just enough to let one final poison slip out under his breath.
“You’ll drag her down,” he murmurs to Silas. “Remember that.”
The words are meant to stick. To burrow. To rot.
My hand closes around his wrist before I even realize I’m moving.
He startles, not because the grip hurts, but because he clearly did not expect me to touch him at all.
His skin under my fingers feels wrong.
“If you threaten him again,” I say, my voice sharp enough to surprise even me, “I’ll bring you with me.”
For a second, the whole hallway beyond the kitchen seems to disappear.
The Warden looks down at my hand on him, then back at my face. Whatever he sees there is enough to make him still completely.
Good.
Because I mean it.
Not in the tidy, moral way girls are supposed to mean things.
Not as a bluff. Not as some empty defense of the boy beside me.
I mean it with every ugly thing my life has already made of me.
If he thinks Silas is the only dangerous thing in this house, he has badly misread where all my damage learned to live.
The Warden says nothing after that.
He pulls his wrist free with what little grace he has left and heads for the front door without another word. The second it opens, the evening air rushes in around him. The second it shuts behind him, the entire house exhales.
No one moves immediately.
My hand is still half-curled from where it held his wrist. Silas is still beside me, tension rolling off him in hard waves.
My father remains seated, but the kindness in his face has not returned yet.
My mother is staring at the front door like she could burn a hole through it if she looked hard enough.
And standing there in the middle of all of it, with the silence settling around us and my pulse still too loud in my own ears, only one thing feels clear.
The Warden did not come here to protect anyone.
He came here to remind us what the world thinks boys like Silas deserve.
For the first time in my life, I am standing in a room full of people who refuse to let that be the last word.
“Jacob,” Silas starts.
The word barely leaves him before my father lifts a hand, Stopping Silas from getting another word out.
The gesture is simple, firm enough that even Silas, who has spent most of his life bracing against authority with his teeth already bared, falls silent immediately.
My father looks at him for a long second, whatever passes between them in that silence feeling older than the room. Not sentimental. Not soft. Something heavier than that. A recognition, maybe. One wounded thing measuring another and deciding not to make him bleed for speaking.
“You protected her,” my father says at last. “Nothing else needs to be said.”
The words settle into the kitchen with more force than any lecture could have.
Silas doesn’t argue. Doesn’t rush to explain. Doesn’t throw his guilt into the room in that rough, half-angry way he does when he wants to get ahead of his own shame. He just nods once, the look on his face so raw, I have to glance away before it undoes me completely.
My mother, who has been standing in a kind of tense stillness since the front door shut behind the Warden, finally exhales, sitting down at the table.
Then, as if some stubborn, maternal instinct in her has decided that if the world insists on being ugly, she will answer it with snacks and domestic force, she starts laying out everything she must have bought on the way home.
Crackers. Chips. Chocolate-covered almonds.
Granola bars. Three different kinds of cookies.
A bowl of fruit that no one is going to touch while the cookies exist.
The whole spread looks almost ridiculous under the circumstances.
Which is maybe why it hurts my chest the way it does.
“No one in this house,” she says, not looking at any one person in particular, “is going to be tied to their past.”
The sentence lands and keeps landing.
Because she doesn’t say it as a platitude. She says it like a decision. Like a boundary she is drawing around all of us. Around me. Around Silas. Around the whole mess of blood, damage and history that keeps trying to follow us through the front door and call itself destiny.
Then her eyes go to Silas properly, something softening in her face.
“You’re our family now, Silas,” she says. “Whatever comes our way, we will handle it.”
The room goes very still after that.
I should feel guilty.
Part of me does.
I should want to tell them everything, every last forbidden, breathless, impossible detail of what has happened between Silas and me.
I should want to confess it like a crime before the kindness in this kitchen makes the weight of it unbearable.
I should want to say, this is not clean, this is not what you think, this has already crossed lines none of us know how to redraw.
But I don’t.
Or at least, the urge is weaker than it should be.
Because as we all sit down, as my mother keeps fussing with the snacks like feeding people is her way of pulling them back from the edge, as my father finally leans back in his chair and some of the hardness leaves his face, I catch the look that passes between him and Silas.
It is brief.
Too brief to call out.
But it is there.
A glance. A flicker of understanding. Something private, yet unsettling and oddly steadying all at once.
Suddenly, a strange certainty settles over me.
Maybe I don't have to say anything.
One of them might already know.