“And you heard Cateline call me a slut?” I watched the line of his shoulders, the way they’d gone rigid. “You weren’t in the room. I didn’t even notice you came in.”
He turned then. Those silver eyes met mine, and for a moment, panic crossed there. Gone before I could blink, but I saw it.
“I’m a quiet person.”
It was true he moved very silently but the excuse landed flat. We both knew it.
I replayed the moment in my head. Cateline’s venomous words. The split second of silence before Solomon’s voice cut through. No footsteps or door opening. He’d just appeared, fully present, as if he’d materialized out of nowhere.
“Right,” I said slowly. “You’re just... quiet.”
“Yes.”
He was a terrible liar. For a man who gave away nothing, his tells right now were screaming. He wouldn’t even hold my gaze.
“Okay.” I let the word sit.
His expression shifted. Relief, maybe. Or its opposite.
“I’ll start on lunch.” He moved past me toward the kitchen, and I let him go.
I stood in the entryway and listened to the sounds of cabinets opening, water running. Normal sounds. The soundtrack of a life that made sense.
But nothing else made sense.
I sank onto the couch and pressed my palms against my eyes until colors burst behind my lids.
The wolf in the forest. Moonlight on black fur. Bones cracking, shifting, becoming a shape I couldn’t name before the knocking pulled me back.
Solomon hearing a conversation from fifty feet away. Appearing without a sound. Knowing exactly what Cateline said when he couldn’t possibly have been close enough to hear it.
Percy dancing with me at a festival I couldn’t remember, a memory that had surfaced without explanation. A memory Cateline just confirmed was real.
The way all three of them looked at me. The pull I felt toward each of them, different flavors of the same impossible want. The way my body recognized them before my mind caught up.
None of this was normal.
But the journal entry made sense. The one I’d written before the drugs and the fire and the stolen week.
“I believe them now after seeing it with my own eyes and I…”
What was it that I saw? That I trusted them enough to write it down?
I picked up the journal from where it had fallen and ran my fingers over the unfinished sentence. The ink had dried mid-word, frozen in the moment before everything changed.
Whatever happened that week, the answers weren’t going to come back on their own.
I needed to find the missing pieces myself.
10
— • —
Percival
Mira is acting strange.
These past three days, she had been watching us with those careful eyes. She asked weird unprompted questions.
