Chapter 6 Silas
SILAS
The corridor outside her cell is quiet except for the soft hiss of the vents, the sound of my boots against the concrete, and the distant murmur of the guards in the outer hall.
Night in the lower levels of the compound always feels heavier than day, not because the lighting changes — it doesn’t — but because there’s no noise to mask the weight of what’s buried here.
I have stood watch on a hundred cells in a dozen facilities for Roman, and yet I have never lingered in any of them like I linger here now.
I press my palm to the panel, the door clicks, and I step inside with a tray balanced in one hand.
Simple food. Bread, broth, a canteen of water.
Roman thinks starving a captive makes them pliable.
I know better. I want her strong, because if she’s strong she won’t break, and if she doesn’t break maybe I’ll remember what it feels like not to be a blade someone else swings.
Mary sits where I left her, knees drawn up, hair falling across her face.
The chains clink softly when she moves. Her eyes track me the entire way from the door to the chair I drag across the floor.
She doesn’t speak. She hasn’t since Roman left this morning.
I set the tray down, lean on my knees, and meet her gaze.
“You should eat,” I say.
“I’m not hungry,” she replies, voice low and steady.
“You haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“I’ve gone longer.”
Her stubbornness draws something almost like a smile from me but it fades before it can reach my mouth. I shift in the chair, the old habit of scanning corners and sightlines rising in me even here where I know the cameras are mine.
“You think this is about feeding you,” I say. “It’s not. It’s about keeping you from bleeding out.”
“Why do you care?” she asks, still without looking at the food.
I exhale through my nose. “Because I don’t want another ghost on my hands.”
She snorts softly, no humor in it. “You already do.”
The silence stretches between us until it becomes a wall. I sit back, fingers laced, eyes fixed on the chain at her wrist. My throat feels tight, but I force the words out anyway.
“Roman wasn’t always like this,” I begin, voice low.
“He didn’t start out wanting cages. He started out wanting control, because control was the only thing we didn’t have.
Our father was killed by people who called themselves protectors.
They burned our house, took everything we had, and left us in the dirt.
Roman taught me how to steal before he taught me how to fight.
He to smile before I learned how to lie. ”
Mary doesn’t look at me. She watches the wall.
“I was fourteen the first time he made me slit a throat,” I continue. “I didn’t even know the man’s name. Roman said he was a threat. He said it was justice. He put his hand on my shoulder after and told me I’d done good.”
Her gaze flickers for a heartbeat, but she stays silent.
“I stayed,” I say. “I stayed because he made me believe there was no world outside his shadow. That loyalty was survival. That blood was a chain you never take off.”
Finally she speaks, voice sharp. “You think telling me this makes you different from him?”
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, eyes locked on hers. “You think you’re the only one who’s been used?”
That lands. She flinches, not with weakness but with recognition. She draws in a slow breath and finally looks at me, not past me, not through me. At me.
“You stayed,” she says quietly.
“I did.”
“You’re still here.”
“For now.”
Her eyes search mine for a long moment, something shifting behind them, then she looks down at the tray. Her fingers twitch once as if she might reach for the bread but she doesn’t.
I stand, moving toward the wall panel. “Come on,” I say.
She blinks up at me. “What?”
“Get up.”
Her brow furrows but she rises slowly, chains clinking, suspicion tightening her shoulders. I press the code and the lock releases with a soft metallic sigh. The cuff falls from her wrist but the belt stays. A compromise. Enough freedom to walk, not enough to run.
I open the door and gesture. “Walk.”
“You’re letting me out?”
“I’m not letting you out. I’m letting you breathe.”
She steps past me into the corridor, barefoot on the cold floor, every movement measured. Her wolf rides just under her skin, I can feel it in the way she holds her head high even though the collar drags.
We walk the narrow hall lined with old storage rooms that haven’t been used in years. No guards here. I arranged it that way. The air smells faintly of oil and dust.
“You planning to kill me out here instead?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “If I wanted you dead, you wouldn’t be standing.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s true.”
She glances at me sidelong. “What’s the point of this?”
“Point is,” I say, voice low, “I know what these walls do. They make you forget what the sky feels like. I don’t want that for you.”
“You’re part of the walls,” she replies.
“I know.”
We stop at the end of the hall where an old maintenance door opens into a courtyard roofed with wire mesh. Cold air leaks through the gaps, carrying the scent of rain and earth from far above. A thin strip of sky glows with the muted light of the moon.
Mary steps forward slowly, tilts her head back, eyes closing as she breathes in. For a moment the tension in her shoulders softens.
“I could run,” she says, voice quiet.
“You won’t.”
“You sound sure.”
“I am.”
“Why?”
I meet her gaze. “Because if you were going to, you’d have done it already.”
She huffs a sound that might almost be a laugh. “Maybe I’m just waiting for you to blink.”
“Maybe you are,” I say.
We stand there for a while, the cold seeping in through my coat, the faint smell of fox and wolf mingling in the air. She doesn’t speak again and neither do I. But she doesn’t run.
Standing there under a strip of sky inside a cage we both built, I feel something like a crack open inside me. Not guilt or pity.
Something like a choice.