Chapter 30
Istand outside Silas’s dorm room, staring at the door while my mind tries to split itself between two versions of him, unsure which is the truth: Silas beneath the harbor, terrified, dragging me toward air with one arm locked around my waist, or Silas sitting with Van somewhere, sending out a text to ensnare me in a murderous trap and finish what The Rites had started.
I raise my fist and pound against the door, pulse skittering. I have no idea which Silas I’m about to find on the other side.
It opens almost immediately.
Silas is smiling.
Not the faint, careful curve of his mouth I’ve learned to recognize as amusement, but a full, unguarded smile that changes his entire face. He looks younger, almost nervous, one hand still resting on the doorknob as though he’d been standing close enough to hear my steps in the hall.
“I’m glad you came,” he says softly. Then he looks closer, and the smile disappears. “Jack—oh my God. Are you okay?”
His eyes move over my torn coat, the mud streaked across my knees, the blood still on my sleeve that I failed to remove completely. Horror empties the color from his face as he reaches for me.
“Don’t touch me!”
I recoil so sharply my shoulder strikes the opposite wall.
A door opens farther down the hall and Silas steps forward, pulling me into his room and shutting it behind us.
“What happened? Come here. You’re shaking,” he says, his voice low and urgent as he walks me over to the bed and sits me down on the edge. “Let me see where you’re hurt.”
His hand moves toward me again, but I flinch away before his fingers make contact.
“Did you do it?”
He freezes, his expression faltering. “What?”
I search his face for any sign of guilt, any flicker that tells me Van was telling the truth.
“Did you send Van to kill me?” I ask, my voice cracking on the question despite my best efforts to hold it together.
“I—what?” he gasps. “Why the hell would I do that?”
“You sent that text, and I left the library. Just like you asked. Then Van grabbed me. He—he dragged me into some gardening shed with one of your fucking ritual knives.” My hands are trembling so badly now that I curl them into fists to stop them.
“He knew I was coming here. He knew,” I whisper, a shudder running through me at the memory of the blade pushed against my throat.
“How did he know, Silas? How did Van know I’d be outside tonight, alone? ”
He takes a step back, guilt flickering across his face.
“I was with them earlier.”
“Who?”
“Rowan… and Van.”
My stomach drops. A laugh escapes me, thin and incredulous.
“You were with them?” The room tilts into an upside-down world I don’t understand. “They’re my enemies, Silas. Rowan almost got me executed at Veil Night. Van has tried to kill me in every single trial of The Rites.”
“I know. I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s… complicated.”
“Explain it to me.”
Silas straightens, something in him seeming to lock into place. Whatever vulnerability I first saw when he opened the door is gone, replaced by the guarded, protected version of him I know all too well.
“You wouldn’t understand,” he says. “I’ve known them my entire life. We don’t always agree—I don’t even like them half the time—but they’re Veil. There are times we still have to work together. Things you don’t yet know.”
“Of course, how could I possibly understand the Veil? I’m just some pathetic outsider, heir to a family that was eliminated,” I say bitterly. “Is that it?”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Van knew about us… at Blackthorn Manor.”
His body goes rigid.
“How do you mean?”
“How do you think I mean?” I snap, heat rising to my face. “The gala, Silas. He knew what happened. That you and I—that we—” I can’t finish the sentence. It’s too humiliating that we had sex, and he apparently told all his asshole friends. “Why would you do that?”
Nausea twists in my stomach. I feel sick at his betrayal.
“I never said a word to Van,” he says, looking genuinely stricken. “Rowan must’ve told him, that bastard.”
“Why would you tell Rowan at all?”
The room falls quiet except for the ticking radiator.
Then Silas turns fully toward me. “Because I wanted him to stay away from you. I told him you were mine,” he says, and something raw and possessive burns in his dark eyes.
“That’s why I asked you to come here. There’s something I need to tell you. ”
“Silas—”
“Please.”
The word stops me.
He hesitates, as though gathering himself for whatever comes next. He looks terrified. Not of Van or the Veil or the final trial of The Rites, but of what he is about to say to me.
“What happened at Blackthorn Manor didn’t mean nothing to me.
It meant everything.” The words come out strangely vulnerable, stripped of all his usual arrogance and bravado.
He cannot quite meet my eyes as he continues.
“My entire life, Lucien taught me that caring about someone only gives the Veil a weapon against you. That attachment makes you weak and anything you love can be used against you.” His fingers curl against his palm, then release.
“I believed him. I thought if I stayed detached, if I never needed anyone, there would be nothing anyone could take from me.” Finally, he makes himself look at me. “Then you showed up.”
Every instinct I have screams at me not to listen, but the sincerity in his face is almost unbearable.
“I know I haven’t been good to you,” he continues.
“In the beginning, I was unkind. I treated you like a problem I could solve. You didn’t deserve that.
” There’s no defense in his expression now, only regret.
“But I can’t keep pretending anymore. I care about you, Mercer.
Fuck, I care about you more than I ever meant to.
More than I thought I ever could care about anyone.
” A small, almost self-conscious smile appears, so unlike Silas that I hardly recognize him.
“I know you don’t trust me. I’m not sure I’ve given you a single reason to.
But I keep hoping, foolishly, that you’ll let me try to earn it, anyway. ”
He draws in a shaky breath, looking at me with a fragile kind of hope in his eyes.
“Do you think—” He stops, starts again. For the first time since I’ve met him, Silas Blackhollow looks genuinely afraid of an answer. “Do you think you could ever feel about me the way I feel about you?”
For one suspended second, I see the version of this night that was supposed to happen.
I see myself arriving, untouched, hearing these words without Van’s blood on my hands or Van’s sick and twisted words in my head.
I see myself saying yes to Silas and crossing the distance between us, finally giving him the part of me I’ve been trying desperately not to admit was already his.
Then the image shatters completely.
“Oh my God.” I let out a shaky, disbelieving laugh. “You must think I’m the biggest fucking idiot in the world.”
Silas flinches. He can only stare at me, stunned into silence.
“You seriously think I’d fall for that? As if I’d really believe that now, after all your lies, you’re finally being honest for once?”
His expression tightens with a hurt he doesn’t bother trying to hide. “Yes, I do,” he says. “Because it’s the truth.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, damn it. And, Jack, there’s more.” He drags a hand through his hair, frustration breaking through. “There are other things I need to tell you. Things I’ve been keeping from you that you need to know. And I’m sorry I never told you, but—”
“Stop!” I shout. “Just stop already! Do you ever tell the truth?”
“To you, now—yes.”
“Is Josh dead?”
Silence.
“Is he dead, Silas?”
Silas does not move. His face changes so completely that I know it even before he speaks. The room seems to contract around us, the walls pressing inward, the air thinning until I cannot draw enough of it into my lungs.
“Yes.”
Something inside me goes cold.
“How long have you known?”
He looks at me, and this time there is no hesitation. “I knew he died last year,” he says. “I found out a few weeks after Veil Night.”
I stop breathing.
A year. He has known for over a year.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“At first, I just wanted you to leave town. I thought you’d be safe that way,” he says.
“You seemed so angry. You would’ve tried to find someone responsible and punish them,” he answers, too quickly, too logically.
“But then, after The Rites began, I knew telling you wouldn’t help you.
What you needed was hope. Believing he might still be alive was the only thing keeping you moving forward. It kept you winning.”
Of course. It has always been about The Rites. Not me or whatever fledgling feelings I stupidly thought might have been developing between us. But winning.
He wanted to keep me useful.
Keep me obedient.
Keep me playing the game.
“You manipulated me,” I say, anger crashing through me so hard it drowns out everything else. “You never cared about me, or what I wanted. You just let me believe he was alive because it kept me exactly where you needed me.”
He closes his eyes for the briefest moment, and when he opens them again, there’s something wounded in his gaze.
“Can’t you see I was trying to protect you?” he asks. “I was wrong to keep the truth from you. I get that now. But everything I did was to keep you safe.”
A lump rises in my throat, so thick it hurts to swallow.
“How did he die?” I whisper. “Did you kill him?”
Silas recoils as though I struck him.
“Of course not. How could you even think that?” he asks, his voice gone hoarse.
“He was trying to perform a Blood Rite. He found one of the old Veil ritual knives and The Book of Eternal Rites—the same book you have. He believed he could bring your father back. He thought he understood what’s required for a blood sacrifice. ”
My fingers go numb as I fist the bedsheets, twisting them so tightly the fabric strains between my hands.
“What happened?”
“He got it wrong,” he says. “The knife turned on him, claiming him instead.”
The grief in his face is real. I hate him for that too.
“That doesn’t make sense. Knives don’t kill people on their own.”
“Veil knives do.” Silas looks away, as if he’s said something he isn’t supposed to.
I don’t understand what he means, and yet my stomach tightens as I think of Van. The way the knife had pulled my hand with it, almost as if it had known exactly where it wanted to go. The memory leaves an uneasy prickle at the back of my mind, but Silas is already speaking again.
“If Josh had asked me about the Blood Rite first, I would’ve stopped him,” Silas continues.
“But he was angry with me. I’d told him to stop chasing the Veil.
That I wouldn’t help him anymore because I thought that was the only way to keep him safe.
” Guilt weighs down his voice. “So he did it alone.”
“All this time, you knew he was dead, and you never said a word.”
“I was going to tell you tonight.”
“Right.” A scoff escapes me. “Before or after you had Van kill me?”
“I didn’t send Van.” His hand lifts, then falls again. “Please, you have to listen to me. There’s more I need to tell you—”
“And my roommate?” I can barely stand to look at him anymore. “Van said putting her in the walls was your idea.”
He doesn’t deny it.
“Everything about you is a lie.” I stand and back away toward the door, watching his face collapse with each word. “I’ll never trust you. And I won’t be your partner anymore.”
“Jack, please—”
“Stay out of my way, Silas, or I’ll kill you,” I hiss, and he goes utterly still. “Just like I killed Van.”
He doesn’t follow me when I leave. Maybe he understands that nothing else he says will matter. Maybe he knows I won’t believe him anymore. Maybe I have broken his heart into a million little pieces just as he’s broken mine.
Or maybe he’s simply calculating his next move.
By the time I reach my room, the shaking has returned so violently I can barely turn the key. I lock the door behind me, sink onto the floor, and finally allow the truth to take hold.
All this time, I have endured The Rites because I believed every trial brought me closer to Josh.
I let myself be trapped in a nightmare tunnel, nearly thrown off a bridge, and seconds from drowning because somewhere beneath the fear, I held on to the certainty that he was still waiting for me to find him.
But I was already too late.
The grief opens inside me, a vast hollow place with no bottom.
For several minutes, I can do nothing but sit against the door with my trembling hands in my lap.
I keep waiting for the tears to come, but they don’t.
The world feels strangely silent, as though every sound has been swallowed by the same emptiness growing inside me.
My brother is dead.
Josh is dead.
I’ll never come home to find him waiting for me with a grilled cheese and tomato soup made from scratch because he knew I hated the canned kind.
I’ll never hear him tease me for stealing his hoodies or answer his nightly calls, the ones he made just to remind Mom and me to lock the doors before bed because he said he couldn’t live with himself if anything ever happened to us.
How will I live in a world without Josh? Without my big brother? I don’t know who I’m supposed to be in a life where he no longer exists.
And then…
I remember.
That day on the bridge, Silas had said the winner of The Rites receives one impossible wish.
A boon. Bound by the Veil itself.
Even after all I’ve seen and heard, I’m still not sure I believe such a thing exists or if magic like that can even be real.
I don’t know whether the promise is literal, or whether anything in this world has the power to reverse death.
But I have witnessed impossible things happen, things I cannot explain away with logic or reason no matter how hard I try, and if there is even the smallest chance that the boon is real, then the goal has changed.
I’m no longer trying to find Josh. I’m going to bring him back.
The realization steadies me. It does not soften the grief, but it gives it direction, sharpens it into something I can use.
Silas wants to lead the Veil. He has spent his entire life being prepared to win these Rites. Until tonight, I never cared who won. I only wanted answers about Josh, but now I need the boon.
Silas has now become the greatest obstacle standing between me and my brother, and I’m the greatest obstacle standing between him and everything he’s ever wanted.
Only one of us can succeed.
And it’s going to be me.