I set down my tea.
Telling him meant watching it stop being mine. The moment the words left my mouth, this thing I'd built—this invisible empire of overheard sins—became a shared problem. A thing to strategize about, to worry over, tomanage. He'd want to know what I planned to do with it. He'd want a say. He'd want to protect me from the consequences, and protection, in my experience, always came packaged with control.
I'd had enough of being managed.
Every person in my life since the accident had decided they knew what was best for me. My therapist stripped my apartment of everything personal because she thought anything familiar would remind me of grief. Geoffrey hovered at my elbow becausehe'd decided I couldn't navigate a room I'd played in for most of my adult life. Viktor told me to stay out of alleys like I was a child who needed minding.
And Milo…Lock your door.
Even my monster couldn't resist the impulse.
No. The archive stayed mine. My leverage. My proof that the woman behind the piano was more than a pretty prop in a silk dress. Sharing it with Milo wouldn't make it safer. It would make it a negotiation. And I was done negotiating for space in my own life.
Besides—and here was the part I wasn't proud of, the part that lived in the same dark corner where I kept the knowledge that walking through a crime scene had made me feel more alive than anything in two years—I liked the secret.
I liked the weight of it. The way it sat behind my ribs like a second heartbeat, heavy and private andmine. I liked knowing that every man in that restaurant—Viktor with his Italian loafers, Geoffrey with his anxious sweat, even Milo with his blood-stained hands and his devastating mouth—was operating with incomplete information.
And I was the only one who had the full picture.
Power. Real power. Not the borrowed kind that came from a man's protection or a therapist's permission. The kind I'd built myself, note by note, night by night, in a room full of people who'd made the mistake of thinking that because I couldn't see, I couldn't hear.
I wasn't ready to give that up.
Not for anyone.
***
I arrived at The Silver Table early again tonight. I wanted time on the piano before the dinner rush, time to find the piece that matched whatever this new frequency was, this hum in my blood that hadn't quieted since I'd woken up.
The restaurant was still in the lull between lunch service and the evening turn. Silverware clinked as waitstaff reset tables. The AC hummed its familiar low drone. The espresso machine hissed and gurgled. My cane tapped a rhythm against the marble, and the sound bounced back at me clean, unobstructed.
"Evening, Raven." Geoffrey, right on cue, materializing from somewhere near the host stand. Peppermint and sweat. The man's anxiety had its own zip code.
"Geoffrey."
"You're early again! That's—oh." His voice shifted. A strange, stalled pause, the kind people made when their eyes landed on something their brain needed a second to process. "That's... you've got a... did you burn yourself?"
The bite mark. He was staring at the bite mark.
"No," I said, and kept walking.
"Because if someone—I mean, if you need—" He was following me now, his loafers slapping against the marble in that frantic half-jog he did when he thought he was being heroic. "We have a first aid kit in the back, and I could?—"
"Geoffrey."
"Yes?"
"It's not a burn."
Three seconds of silence while his brain caught up to what his eyes had already told him. I could practically hear the gears grinding.
"Oh. Oh! Well. That's... good. That's... great. I mean?—"
I stopped. Turned my face toward the exact spot where his voice originated. "Geoffrey. Do I ask you about the marks your partner leaves on you? I mean, I can't see them. Obviously. But do you think I would?"
Dead silence. I heard his lungs seize with one strangled inhale, then nothing, then a breath that came out thin and whistling through his teeth.
"That's what I thought." I resumed walking. Nineteen paces past the host stand. Slight left. Twelve paces to the platform.
