But all at once it turns poisonous too, because men have said things to me before. Men have promised things before. Men have wrapped themselves in tenderness before they reached for what they wanted. People like me do not hear love the way other people hear it. We hear danger in prettier clothes. We hear the start of a bargain. We hear the word people use to make taking feel less ugly.
That realization hurts so badly I can barely stand upright under it.
“Get out,” I say again, but this time my voice is lower, steadier in the worst possible way. “I’m not asking again.”
No one argues after that.
Maria reaches for Cheyenne first, because Cheyenne still looks like she wants to stay and fix something that no one in this room can fix. Kadin lingers half a second longer than the girls do, his face tight with confusion, frustration, and some lingering urge to be useful that only makes me want him gone faster.
They start toward the door.
That’s when I finally look up and see that Silas is still standing there.
He hasn’t moved.
He hasn’t said a word.
He is just there in the doorway, watching me with that unbearable, heavy stillness of his, the sight of him only making everything in me feel more exposed. The girls slip past him carefully. Kadin doesn’t take his eyes off either of us while he moves toward the hall.
Silas stays where he is.
“That means you too,” I tell him.
My voice shakes again now, the force draining out of it all at once, leaving something rawer behind.
“Don’t bother me.”
My hand drifts under my shirt without thinking, covering the scars along my stomach in a gesture so old and instinctive I don’t realize I’m doing it until I feel my own palm there. My whole body is still trembling from what I let happen in the bathroom. From the text. From the headline. From the fact that I let him close enough to make me forget and now I can’t tell whether that was mercy or another kind of ruin.
Silas’s jaw tightens.
He takes one step into the room.
That movement is all it takes for Kadin to stop in the hall, turning back, anger rising cleanly into his face now that he has something concrete to aim it at.
“I think she wants you to leave,” he says, voice hard. “Or am I misreading that?”
The room sharpens around the sentence.
What had been panic and shame a moment ago now has a new edge to it.
Suddenly every person in the room is standing at the edge of a very different kind of disaster.
The problem is, I think I've already fallen.
CHAPTER 24
Silas
Imeant it.
That is the thought that keeps circling, stripping itself down to bone every time it comes back. Not a drunken exaggeration. Not heat speaking in a borrowed language. Not some convenient lie born in a bathroom full of steam and bad decisions. I meant every fucking word, and now I’m stuck sitting in the aftermath of that truth while the house settles around me like nothing permanent has just happened inside it.
Sitting on the edge of my bed, I listen.
The wall between our rooms is thin enough that I can hear the shape of her grief without hearing every detail of it. A muffled sound. A broken breath. The soft, ruined kind of crying people do when they’re trying not to let anyone hear them at all. Every time it reaches me, my whole body tenses with the need to get up, cross the hall, knock on her door, and do something useful with my hands for once.
I don’t move.
