Salvatore stood there—half-swallowed in shadow, glowering. His arms hung stiff at his sides, fists clenched, jaw locked tight.
He looked like a storm waiting for permission.
Or maybe one barely contained by flesh.
I looked away.
I’d thought giving him distance would help. That silence might cool what still burned between us. But silence here didn’t soothe—it festered.
Still, I had other things to think about.
Bigger things.
The trials.
Survival.
Finding a way out of this place before it devoured what little of us was left.
And beneath all of it, beneath every breath and bruise, was the same truth—I had to get back to Amara.
Somehow. Some way.
Back to her hands, her voice, her life.
Every step I endured here was a step toward her.
Whether he wanted to stand beside me or not.
That night, we sat slumped against opposite walls of the cell, our backs to the same stone but worlds apart. The air was thick with the smell of sweat, blood, and something sourer—hopelessness. The kind that seeped into the fissures of your bones and stayed there.
The silence stretched so long it became a sound of its own.
Then Salvatore broke it.
“Who are your new little friends?”
His voice was low, but there was an edge beneath it—a blade hiding in soft cloth.
I didn’t look at him. “Why does it matter?”
“It matters,” he said, “because you’re talking to them. And not to me.”
I shifted on the cold floor, scraping my shackles across the grit, putting a little more distance between us.
“I was giving us space, Salvatore.”
“I didn’t want space,” he said quickly. The words stumbled out as if they’d been waiting too long to breathe. “I need my best friend.”
He swallowed, voice cracking. “Please… don’t turn away from me. Not like everyone else has.”
And that… broke something in me.
I turned. His face was burdened with exhaustion, his eyes raw with the kind of desperation that lived beneath anger.
Despite everything, he was still Salvatore.
Still, the boy who once stood between me and a blade.
