23. ~Silas~
~Silas~
“Cause I’d hope we leave first, and never after—to ensure such a tragedy as beautiful and serene as your ascension without us, Pretty Peony,” I murmur to the fire, and then I let the rest of it loose, the part I have never once said aloud to a living soul.
“Never transpires. Not in this lifetime… nor the next.”
Honesty has never been my strong suit. It’s a costume I wear poorly, a fabric that never sits right on my frame, and no one has ever been permitted to see me without the gilding—no one but Lucien and Riot, who learned the shape of this stripped-down thing slowly and at great cost.
This.
The vulnerable sculpture underneath, the skeleton beneath the flesh, the quiet petal that lives where the showman stands.
The real me, buried in the foundations beneath the louder me built to survive a world that never had any use for the original.
I couldn’t tell you when it started, the splitting.
Why it truly began.
The slow de-coupling of one self from another so that the first wouldn’t have to stand in the confrontations, wouldn’t have to feel the precise weight of never measuring up to the standards the world swung like a cudgel.
Somewhere in the long childhood of being walked over, shoved, ridiculed, made the mule for other people’s cruelty, I began constructing a personality that couldn’t be trampled—brighter, sharper, theatrical enough that the blows landed on the costume and not the boy inside it.
And it worked.
That’s the terrible secret of it. It worked so well it became an addiction, a country I preferred to live in, a Crowe so vivid the world forgot to look for a Silas at all.
Only in the rare hours of tranquility does the petal unfurl.
When I am lost in art, in the meditative pull of knitting, or—and I dare admit it—in the sacred work of dressing and grooming the dead, readying them for their final celebration amid the hush of an embalming room, there and only there can I be this soft true thing that nothing in the world has managed to wilt.
It is a short list of sanctuaries.
I have guarded it ferociously my whole life.
The dead, you see, never demand a performance.
They make no expectations a person can fail to meet.
There is no one left in a body to sneer at the boy who was never quite enough, and so the embalming room became, paradoxically, the one place I could be most alive—most myself, most gentle, my hands moving with a tenderness the living never earned from me.
People find it macabre when they learn of it.
They have it precisely backwards.
It is the kindest work I know. To take what cruelty left behind and make it beautiful again, to send the ruined off with dignity restored—there has always been a prayer in it, for me.
A quiet insistence that even the most broken thing deserves to be made lovely one last time.
I think now that I have been rehearsing for her my entire life and never knew it.
And yet.
This pretty Peony, watching me now with those raw and undefended eyes, with that addicting scent of hers—strawberries and dark ganache and pink velvet under the bright bite of metal—that has been picking at the mortar of my walls for weeks, yearning them to crumble: she is the first new being in years I have wished, deliberately, to let inside the sanctuary.
To let see the petal.
Perhaps so that she might finally understand the thing neither of us cares to say plainly—that we are far more alike than either of us has dared admit.
The look we share stretches long and intense, firelit and weighted, and I watch her gaze drop to my mouth—watch her weigh the next move with the careful deliberation of a woman who has learned that every door she opens might cost her.
I don’t rush her.
I would never rush her.
Though my treacherous heart skips a beat and then another, because I would be lying if I claimed I didn’t want her, and I do.
I want her far more than is wise. Wanting is the most dangerous game I know, more perilous than any blade or any corpse, because once I want a thing, truly want it, I do not relinquish it. Ever.
It becomes mine to keep, mine to guard, mine to follow into ruin.
When her eyes lift back to mine, I see it bloom in them. The conviction. The decision arriving whole and certain. And when she leans in, I hold my breath—actually hold it, the showman struck silent for once—until her lips press to mine. Firmly.
Without a flicker of doubt in the seal of them.
My knitting needles slip from my fingers and fall to the rug, whatever careful row I’d reached abruptly meaningless, because both my hands have found her face, cupping the delicate architecture of her jaw as I take the lead of the kiss I have been quietly starving for since the first time I called her sweet and meant every syllable.
She tastes of the night and of sugar and of something underneath that I can only call surrender, and I drink it like a man who didn’t know how thirsty he’d become.
She has no idea how valuable she is.
That’s the tragedy threaded through all her brilliance—she cannot see her own worth, this precious, priceless creature, this true mastermind dropped into a game the rest of us only think we’re any good at. We speak of life like chess, the four of us, the way clever and dangerous people do.
And in that framing she is the Queen—the piece we would burn the whole board to protect. Except that’s the part the others occasionally miss and I never do: she isn’t the piece being protected.
She’s the one playing.
She has been three moves ahead this entire time, letting us believe we guard her while she quietly arranges the endgame, waiting with infinite patience to slide the final piece into place and breathe the word checkmate over the throat of the man who thinks he’s hunting her.
And that what I adore most.
Not the beauty, though the beauty is a knife. Not the madness, though the madness is a delight. The mastermind underneath both, the cold gorgeous machine of her mind humming away beneath all that lovely chaos.
I have never wanted anything the way I want a woman who could out-think me.
The men who came before us looked at her and saw only the surfaces—a beautiful asset, a useful signature, a body to own and a mind to manage.
They never once saw the player behind the piece.
It is, I think, the single greatest miscalculation any of them made, and the husband chief among them: to mistake the most dangerous mind in the room for the prize sitting prettily at its center.
They built their whole strategies around containing her. None of them grasped that she had already read the board, had been reading it since before they sat down, and was simply waiting, patient as a held breath, for the rest of us to make our moves.
I refuse to make that error.
I will adore the player. I will worship the strategist.
And I will hand her the scalpel and step back to watch what only a true artist can do with it.
I have her beneath me in a heartbeat, the slow theatrical restraint I usually pride myself on abandoned at the altar of her mouth.
My own clothes come away between kisses—the antique layers I sew so carefully shed without a thought—and the single dress I made to hug the lines of her body slips off as easily as it was always meant to, a thing designed by my hands to come undone for them.
She doesn’t know how I admire her.
The strength sketched into her frame, the dancer’s discipline, the lean evidence of a woman who insists on keeping pace with her own fierce hobbies—it undoes something in me, the proof of her vitality, her refusal to be soft and ornamental and still.
I crave lust the way Riot does, the hunger a constant low hum in the blood of us both—but where Riot can dive headlong into any heat and simply take, I am a devotee of the slow build.
The inviting ascent.
The exquisite torment of a fulfillment drawn out until it begs.
I am, I’ve come to understand, the balance point of the three of us: Lucien with his patient scholar’s need to learn every secret of a woman before he permits himself to want her, Riot with his immediate consuming fire, and me suspended in the middle—the slow unveiling of identity that ripens, layer by layer, into something molten.
So I take my time with her.
I worship the slow way, the way that lets the fire dance higher between us before it consumes, until we’re both lost to the heat of it and the world beyond the hearth ceases, mercifully, to exist.
We’re breathless when we finally surface, tangled and warm, and the firelight plays along the scarred landscape of her body in a way that steals what little composure I have left.
Every mark a chapter.
Every old wound a sentence in a story the world wrote on her without consent, and somehow she has made even that beautiful, the way a cracked vase glazed in gold becomes worth more than the unbroken one.
“I feel like Peonies are too pure for someone like me,” she confesses, so quietly the flames nearly swallow it.
And when I meet her eyes, there she is.
Not Vex, not Violet, not any of the bright armored selves—Genevieve, the truest and most carefully buried layer of her, looking out at me unguarded in the firelight the way I am looking back, both of us stripped to the rawest version we own.
So I tell her the truth, because that is the only currency this moment will accept.
I tell her what the Peony means. I break it down to its sacred cores—that it is the bloom of honor and of healing, of compassion and of a life lived richly despite the odds; that in the old languages of flowers it signified a beauty so serene, so complete, that it drew envy the way honey draws the blade of a knife.
“You are a Peony,” I murmur against her temple, “because you are a serene thing the world could not bear to leave unspoiled. So pure in your core that it made the cruel and the small desperate to ruin you, simply because they could not have you, could not be you, could not fathom you.”
She smiles, small and aching.
“But it did,” she whispers. “Ruin me.”
She looks down the length of herself then, at the map of scars, as if every mark is a verdict—as if her own flesh stands as evidence against her, proof of the unworthiness the world spent a lifetime insisting upon.
I follow her gaze, and I do not flinch from a single mark, because flinching would be its own kind of lie. I have spent a decade reading bodies—the dead tell me their endings in the language of their wounds, every bruise a sentence, every scar a confession.
And hers tell me a story I would carve into stone if I could: not a story of ruin, but of refusal.
Each one is a place the world tried to close a door on her and failed.
Each one is proof she was still breathing when whatever made it walked away.
Ruined things don’t fight back. Ruined things lie down and let the dark have them.
She is covered head to foot in the evidence of every time she chose, instead, to survive—and there is nothing on this earth I find more achingly, terribly beautiful than that.
I reach down and take her chin between my fingers, gentle but unyielding, and force it up until she has no choice but to meet my gaze and let me hold hers there.
“Your heart still beats,” I tell her, low and absolute. “After all of it…every hand that tried to stop it…it still beats. And no matter how desperately the world wants to label you, to file you away as some Pretty Darling Psycho and be done with the inconvenience of you…guess what.”
I reach for the collar at her throat. I flick the red metal heart that rests against the hollow of it, the one that reads THEIRS in bold defiant letters, our three names engraved small and permanent on the reverse.
“You’re Our Pretty Darling Psycho. Ours—and we are the ones who will never ruin you. You could be our end, sweet thing. Our undoing. Our demise.” I let the words fall slow and certain into the firelit dark. “And you would still be our favorite obsession.”
I mean every word, and the meaning of it frightens even me a little.
Obsession is not a word I use loosely; I have built my entire life around the careful management of my appetites, the discipline of wanting at arm’s length. But there is no arm’s length left where she is concerned.
She has become the fixed point my whole compass swings toward, the one beautiful problem I will never tire of solving, and I have stopped pretending otherwise even to myself. Let the husband keep his ownership and his deeds and his transactions.
We don’t want to own her.
We want to be ruined by her, gladly, completely, and call the ruin a privilege.
She smiles at that, and her eyes go glassy and bright, because she knows—reads it in me the way she reads everything, that flawless instrument of a mind that catches every lie ever told and finds none in me.
Not one.
I understand, watching the truth land in her, that this is the thing she has hungered for since the very first betrayal carved her open: since the man who stole her father from her, the one person in all her life who never once felt the need to lie to her.
That is the wound beneath every other wound. Not the cage, not the cruelty, not the scars. The loss of the only honesty she ever trusted.
So we will give it back to her.
The honesty, and the vengeance both. We will hunt down the artist who composed her ruin and we will collect every debt owed to our Little Omega, slow and thorough and merciless—and if the collecting leads us all to our end, then so be it.
I made my peace with a beautiful death long before I ever met her.
I simply never had anything worth dying for until now.
“Ours,” I assure her, leaning down to seal it against her mouth.
“Yours,” she whispers right back, and seals it with a kiss.