Chapter 45
Octavia
Reality does not return gently. It claws its way back in through pain.
Heat blazes along my side first, so sharp and merciless it feels as though somebody has laid a strip of fire beneath my skin.
The force of it jerks me upright before thought can catch up.
A sound tears out of my throat, broken, while the room swings wildly around me in a blur of white walls, dim machines, plastic tubing, a hospital smell so clean it feels violent after the filth of that motel.
Terror arrives before reason.
My breath turns thin, my hands flying to my body, searching blindly for tape, for rope, for blood, for any proof that I am still there, still trapped, still too late to save him.
The movement sends another searing line of agony through my side.
My whole body folds around it, trembling, trying and failing to outrun what memory has not yet sorted into order.
“Honey, it’s okay.”
My mother’s voice reaches me from too far away, then all at once she is there, one hand at my shoulder, the other hovering uselessly near my face as if she cannot decide whether touching me will soothe me or break me apart further.
Her eyes are swollen, her mascara gone, every bit of her composure washed out by fear and sleeplessness.
She looks nothing like the version of her I carry in my ordinary life.
This is a mother dragged to the edge of losing her child and left there long enough to age years in a night.
My father stands on the opposite side of the room, though “stands” is almost too steady a word for the way he holds himself.
Something about him looks caved in. The man who usually fills a room with quiet confidence now seems to be bracing against invisible weight, shoulders stiff, mouth drawn, eyes ringed with exhaustion.
Seeing him look at me that way hurts almost as much as the wound in my side.
The room comes into focus piece by piece.
Hospital bed. IV pole. Monitors. A narrow chair in the corner. Pale morning light pressing through half-closed blinds. No motel wallpaper. No Handler. No tape on my wrists. No blood on the floor.
No Silas.
That absence slams through me so hard I think I might be sick again.
He must be all over my face, because my father speaks before I can.
“Silas is outside,” he says quickly, voice rough from disuse. “They got him bandaged up a few days ago.”
A few days.
The words move through me slowly, too slowly, as if my mind has to force each one into place with shaking hands.
A few days means darkness longer than sleep.
A few days means my body failed hard enough that life kept moving while I disappeared.
A few days means the last thing I saw was him frantically running toward me, the image burned inside my mind.
My father’s gaze drops briefly to the blanket over my waist, to the place where pain is still throbbing under gauze and stitches.
“Your injuries were worse,” he says, the sentence nearly breaking him in half. “Much worse.”
Memory begins to break the surface after that in vicious little shards.
The parking lot. Kadin’s face. The pipe. Silas falling. The motel. The mask coming off. That man’s eyes. The way he tore into us. All the blood... so much blood.
The word leaves my mouth before I can stop it.
“The Handler.”
My father’s expression hardens immediately. Not with surprise. With cold certainty.
“He’s dead,” he whispers.
No softness. No room left around it. Just finality.
The sentence hangs there for a beat before he adds, more quietly, “Silas made sure of it.”
Relief should come first. It doesn’t. What comes first is the image of Silas hurt, bound, poisoned, then somehow still finding enough violence in himself to make that statement true.
Relief follows, but it is tangled up in fresh horror, in gratitude sharp enough to hurt, in the sick knowledge that he carried the worst of me into that room and came back with blood on him.
Another name rises after that, rougher, stranger.
“My mom…”
My mother answers me this time.
“Buried again,” she says, tears spilling immediately. “Properly. She’s gone.”
Gone.
The word does not bring peace. Not yet. Too much wreckage still sits between me and anything like peace.
Still, something in my chest shifts. The thought of her body no longer being in his hands, no longer dragged through my life as one more cruelty meant only for me, opens a small space inside all the panic.
A hand scrapes through my hair, fingers snagging uselessly on tangles. Every thought feels too loud. Only one thing remains simple.
Need.
I Need him. I Need his voice. I Need to see him breathing with my own eyes before the terror that has fused itself to my bones loosens even an inch.
“I need to see Silas.”
The words leave me, instantly turning into action. Blankets shove downward. My body tries to rise before sense can intervene. Pain answers immediately, monstrous and white-hot, slicing through my side so brutally that the room flashes around the edges. A cry breaks from me before I can swallow it.
My mother reaches for me at once. “Honey, no, you need to stay down.”
The sound that comes back out of me surprises even me.
“No.”
The word cracks through the room with more force than my body should have left.
My mother stills. My father’s face tightens. Neither interrupts when the rest comes pouring after it, because there is no holding back now that the fear has split open properly.
“No, you don’t get to ask that of me right now,” I say, voice shaking so hard it almost shakes apart. “Not after all this. Not after that room. Not after waking up and not seeing him here.”
Tears come fast enough to blur everything, but they do nothing to slow the words.
“The man I love nearly died in front of me. He nearly died because of me, because of that thing from my past, because everything rotten in my life came back at once and dragged him into it. So no, I am not going to lie here and rest like that matters more than him.”
Every breath hurts. Every sentence pulls against my side. None of it matters.
“He saw all of it,” I choke out. “He saw the worst thing that ever happened to me. He bled in that room with me. He came for me. He stayed. He did not look away. He did not leave. He did not let them have me.”
My mother’s hand is over her mouth now. My father has gone very still, though pain is plain on his face.
The words keep coming, stripped free now of pride and fear and every neat little story I have ever told myself about what I was supposed to hide.
“Nothing else matters to me right now. Not school. Not what this means for my future. Not whether people think it’s wrong. Not whether this house can survive hearing it. He is the one I want. He is the one I love. He is the one I need in this room more than I need another minute of rest.”
A sob catches and breaks through me.
“If loving him gets me judged, then fine. If it ruins whatever version of my life everyone else thought I was headed for, I do not care. If telling the truth means I get thrown out, I still do not care. He was the one I thought of when I thought I was dying. He is the one I woke up needing. He is the one person whose face can make this feel survivable. So please stop asking me to be reasonable about this.”
By then the tears are unstoppable, my body shaking with them, every tremor pulling at stitches, fresh pain mixing with old terror and relief until all of it becomes one giant unbearable thing.
My mother reaches me first.
Not with words. Not with correction. Just with arms.
Gently, she gathers me into her chest while I sob into her shoulder like something much younger than the woman lying in that hospital bed. No attempt is made to hush me. No one tells me to calm down. The grief is too big for that. The truth of it has already filled the room.
When she finally pulls back enough for me to breathe, her face is wet too.
Then a voice from the doorway says softly, “Think he should probably hear that himself.”
The whole world stops.
My head turns.
Silas is there.
For one impossible second, breath refuses to come at all.
He looks terrible. Beautiful. Alive.
A bandage wraps around his head, stark against dark hair.
Bruises shadow his face, blooming yellow and violet beneath one eye, disappearing under the collar of the hospital shirt someone must have forced onto him.
One arm is strapped tight in a sling. Cuts mark his knuckles, his jaw, the skin at his throat.
He looks exhausted in a way that reaches past sleeplessness and into pure devastation.
He also looks so painfully, achingly alive that the sight of him nearly tears me apart all over again.
My father steps aside without speaking. My mother’s hand squeezes mine once before she moves back to join him.
That is all the permission he needs.
Silas crosses the room faster than his injuries should allow. Every step looks expensive, paid for in pain. Still, he comes. The second he reaches the bed, his good arm gathers me against him as if the whole hospital could disappear so long as he gets there first.
Every part of me folds into him on instinct.
My face presses into his chest. His body is warm.
Real. His heart is beating so hard beneath my ear that for one dizzying second it feels like my own pulse has been returned to me.
The scent of antiseptic clings to him. So does blood, faintly.
So does Silas, underneath everything else, enough to undo me completely.
Sobs come harder than before.
His hand moves through my hair, down my back, over my shoulder, anywhere he can touch without hurting me more. His face buries itself in the top of my head.
“You were dead.”
The words leave him in a whisper so wrecked they almost don’t sound human.
The sentence hits harder than the stabbing ever could.