He does.
That’s the thing I see first in his face. Not only pain. Not only anger. Belief.
Letting go, he staggers down the first few stairs awkwardly, catching himself on the banister before he can pitch forward entirely. His breath is ragged now, one hand over his mouth, the other grabbing for the railing while he tries to orient himself through shock.
At the bottom, he turns back just enough to look up at me.
There’s bewilderment there first, because men like him never fully expect violence until it finds them. Then that gives way to something meaner. Something promising.
Wiping his mouth, he stares at the blood on his hand as if it personally offends him.
“You’re going to regret that.” He hisses, speaking through a torn, gasping breath.
The sentence doesn’t come out as a threat so much as a vow.
Opening the front door, he leaves, shutting it hard enough to rattle the frame. Silence rushes in after him, consuming the space in an eerie quiet.
For a second I stay where I am at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, blood running warm over my knuckles, trailing down into my palm. The whole house feels like it’s holding its breath around me. I can feel the violence still in my body, not fading, just settling deeper, finding places to live now that the movement is over.
Then I turn.
Octavia is standing halfway in the doorway of her room.
Or maybe she was. By the time I fully face the hall, she is already slipping back inside, her hand on the frame, her face emptied out into something so blank it unsettles me more than if she’d screamed.
She saw all of it.
The punches. The dragging. The threat. The exact shape of my violence when I stop trying to keep it inside.
Yet, she didn’t say a word.
That realization lands harder than Kadin’s fists ever could have.
Because now I don’t know what the silence means. Fear. Shock. Recognition. Confirmation of every terrible thing she should think of me. The blank look on her face before she disappeared is worse than hatred would have been, because hatred at least would be clear.
Instead, I’m left standing there in the hallway with blood on my hands, the echo of my own threat still in the house, realizing she watched me become exactly what everyone has always warned her I am.
Worst of all…she didn’t even try to stop me.
CHAPTER 25
Octavia
There is no hesitation in Silas.
Not a single beat of it.
The second Kadin spits those words, the second he drags my past out into the open and turns it into something filthy, Silas moves like fury is the only honest language left in the world. I hear the first impact before I fully understand what’s happening, hear the sound of flesh meeting bone, hear Kadin stumble, hear the wall shake. I should stop it. I know I should. But my body won’t move. I stand there in the doorway of my room with every nerve in me locked in place, listening to violence answer violence in the only way Silas has ever trusted.
Then Kadin says something worse.
I hear it through the blood pounding in my ears.
I hear enough.
And I wish to God I didn’t.
By the time the front door slams and the house finally falls still, I feel like I’m no longer standing in my own life. I feel split open. The article, the texts, my mother’s body stolen even in death, Kadin’s mouth spewing my past, Silas’s love in thebathroom, his hands, his voice, the way all of it keeps piling up until even breathing feels like work.
