Chapter 35
Octavia
“Kadin hasn’t been to class all week,” Cheyenne says, tossing a piece of popcorn into the air before catching it neatly in her mouth. The grin she throws over at me is all teeth and satisfaction, the kind that says she is enjoying this far more than she should.
“Probably needed time to heal,” Silas mutters.
His voice is dry, almost lazy, though nothing about the way he holds me feels careless.
I’m curled between his legs on the floor at the foot of my bed, wrapped in a blanket with my head resting against his chest while his back leans against the frame.
One of his arms is looped low around my waist. The other hand stays beneath the blanket, both thumbs rolling slowly over my thighs in a touch so absentmindedly intimate it keeps dragging my attention away from the conversation.
Tilting my head back, I look up at him. “I thought you said you only verbally threatened him.”
A smirk tugs at my mouth when I say it.
Across from us, Maria slaps a hand over her mouth to hide her laugh, which only makes the sound worse. She folds in on herself, shoulders shaking, then points at him like she cannot believe he is still pretending innocence.
“Did you not see him later that day?” she asks. “His friends took pictures of him after he left the weight room. Tell me something. Did you even try to catch the bar?”
That does it. Her laugh spills out full force.
Silas lets out a slow breath through his nose, the picture of irritation. “Catch?” he says. “More like he caught his own stupidity. I leaned on it. He panicked. Same difference.”
The way he says it sends a pulse of heat through me that has nothing to do with the blanket. That same cold confidence is what keeps ruining me for normal boys, the certainty in him, the complete lack of shame about being exactly as dangerous as he looks.
“So he’s avoiding your wrath?” I ask softly.
His thumbs drag once more over my thighs, slower this time, as if he knows exactly how distracting the motion is becoming.
“If he’s smart,” he says, “yes.”
Cheyenne rolls her eyes and tosses another piece of popcorn at us, this one bouncing off the blanket near my knee. “You all are insane. Truly. Also, there is no chance in hell Steph and Jacob haven’t caught on to…” Her hand waves vaguely between me and Silas. “This.”
The word hangs there.
This.
Not just the sex. Not just the tension. The whole twisted, impossible thing between us that somehow stopped feeling impossible the second we both admitted it out loud.
“Jacob knows enough,” Silas says after a pause. There is something quieter in his tone when he says my father’s name, a caution I still do not fully understand because whatever passed between the two of them remains mostly his to keep. “Steph has enough to worry about.”
Maria’s eyes widen with delight, because she hears the same thing Cheyenne does and immediately chooses the worst possible interpretation. “Enough?” she whispers dramatically. “So basically that means free rein to fuck whenever you want?”
I groan, dropping my face against Silas’s chest for half a second. “That is not what my dad meant.”
“No,” Maria says, far too pleased with herself. “But it is what you’re doing.”
Her finger points straight at Silas. “Also, I can still see her nail marks on your shoulder, bud.”
My head lifts at once.
His shirt is crooked enough that she’s right.
The collar has slipped just low enough to reveal one angry red crescent near the slope of his shoulder, one of several little pieces of evidence I left on him the night before.
Heat floods my face immediately. In hindsight, sneaking into his room at three in the morning has never once ended in anything resembling restraint.
Silas glances down at me, catching the flush climbing up my neck, the slow smile that spreads across his mouth enough to make my whole body go weak in a way I hate.
“Watching her try to stay quiet?” he says, shrugging one shoulder with infuriating ease. “Better than any drug.”
Twisting, I swat him on instinct, scandalized despite the fact that half of me is reliving it already. His laugh is brief, but, real, the sound melting something in me instantly.
“God,” Cheyenne says, gawking at both of us, “is it bad that I kind of love how fucked up this is?”
“You’re supposed to be helping me find a dress, asshole,” I shoot back, nudging her with my foot from under the blanket.
“So are both of you,” she says, pointing accusingly at Maria and me. “Spokehaven’s formal is a huge deal. You cannot both show up looking like emotionally unstable Victorian widows.”
Maria gasps in offense. “I could absolutely pull that off.”
Cheyenne ignores her, swinging her attention to Silas next. “Also, do you even know what a suit is, or do we need to drag you into civilization one fitting at a time?”
That starts another round of bickering between the three of them, harmless, loud and easy in a way my life rarely gets to be.
Cheyenne keeps talking over Maria. Silas answers with that half-bored, half-amused drawl that makes it obvious he’s enjoying himself more than he wants to admit.
A soft smile stays on his mouth while he argues back, one hand still on my leg beneath the blanket, absentmindedly keeping me anchored to him.
Then my phone buzzes.
The sound is small.
It slices through the room anyway.
My attention drops immediately. Their voices blur at the edges while I reach for the phone beside me, the soft grin still fading slowly from Silas’s face as he keeps bantering with Cheyenne, completely unaware of the way my stomach has already started to tighten as the screen lights in my hand.
A picture fills it.
At first my mind takes it in wrong. Color before meaning.
Texture before recognition. Dirt-dark shadows.
The ruin of cloth. Flesh made into something that no longer belongs to the living.
Then one detail slides into place, the rest of it following in one sickening rush that feels like the floor has dropped out from under me.
My mother.
Not as memory. Not as the woman who lived in my nightmares with smeared lipstick, shaking hands, and a voice that always sounded one drink away from turning mean.
Not as the mother who dragged strangers through motel doors and called every fresh horror survival because naming it anything kinder would have required admitting what she had made of me.
Her body.
What is left of it.
Dug up. Exposed. No dignity left to hide behind.
The image is worse than decay. Decay would almost be merciful.
This is interruption. Rot dragged into daylight.
Skin collapsed in places where time has already claimed it, earth still clinging to what was once her, clothing half-torn and blackened with grave dirt, the shape of her face warped enough to make recognition feel like its own violence.
It is not a body meant to be seen. It is a body that was ripped out of the dark and arranged in front of me like a threat.
There is something especially sick about the fact that I know it is her anyway.
The line of her hair. The ruined outline of her mouth. The old familiarity of the woman who made my life a grave long before they ever lowered her into one.
This is not just death on a screen.
It is desecration right before my eyes.
A message hidden inside a photograph.
Look.
Look what we pulled back up.
Look what still reaches for you.
Look what refuses to stay buried.
Look how far we can drag the dead just to make sure you understand that nothing in your life, not even the things already rotting in the ground, is ever really beyond our hands.
Everything inside me turns over at once.
The room tilts so violently I barely understand I’m moving until I’m dragging myself away from Silas, the blanket tangling around my legs, my hand slipping on the edge of the mattress.
My stomach heaves before I can even breathe through it.
I barely manage to twist away from them before I vomit onto the floor in one humiliating, violent rush.
The sound of the room changes immediately.
Cheyenne says my name. Maria gasps. Something falls over beside the bed.
None of it lands properly because another wave hits me just as hard, my whole body convulsing around it.
Tears spring to my eyes from the force of it.
My throat burns. The image stays in my head anyway, obscene and impossible to outrun.
A hand is on my back before I even register anyone moving.
Silas.
Of course it’s him.
His palm spreads between my shoulder blades, steady, rubbing once, then again, firm enough to keep me in my body while everything in me is trying to recoil from the screen, from the memory, from the fact that even death has not been enough to end what my mother left behind.
Coughing, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, trying to pull in a real breath. It doesn’t come easily. My whole chest feels locked. The room is too bright now. Too loud. Too full of other people watching me break.
Silas crouches lower beside me, still touching my back, his voice the first thing that cuts through cleanly.
“What happened?”
I shake my head once, not because I don’t want to answer, but because I can’t form anything coherent enough to survive saying aloud. My hand points uselessly toward where the phone must have fallen.
“The phone,” I manage.
The words scrape out of me thin and ruined.
Silas reaches for it instantly.
I see his hand close around it from the corner of my eye. I see the screen turn toward him. Then I see his whole body go still.
Not subtly.
Completely.
His eyes widen in a way I have learned to fear, because it means whatever he is looking at has gone beyond anger and into something colder, something that cuts so deep it takes a second to even become fury.
For one suspended beat, nobody says anything.
Then the phone starts ringing.
Silas answers before the noise has the chance to settle into the room.