The words strike so deep I can barely stay upright.
“Want to carve names into somebody?” he says. “Use me. Want to mark the ruined? Fine. Mark me. But don’t you stand here and help them finish what they started.”
My breath catches on a sob.
Letting his shirt fall, his bloody hands come to my face.
Cupping me so carefully it almost destroys me, blood smears warm across my skin, his thumbs trembling at my cheeks. He leans in close enough that our foreheads nearly touch, his breathing hard, his rage, love, and fear so tightly wound together I can’t tell where one ends and the next begins.
“If loving you means I have to prove it in blood, I will,” he says.
The sentence is not dramatic in his mouth. It is not a line. It is a vow.
“If killing every bad thing left in your life is what I have to do, I will.”
I should be afraid of how much he means it.
Instead I feel something in me break open.
Because he is not speaking like a boy trying to impress me. He is speaking like someone who has finally found one sacred thing and decided the rest of the world can choke on its teeth if it comes too close.
Tipping my face up more firmly, he forces my eyes to his.
“Look at me,” he whispers, and I do.
His eyes are blazing. Not only with fury. With grief. With devotion. With the terrible restraint of someone who wants to burn the world down and touch me gently at the same time.
“I am not here because I pity you. I am not saying this because I got under your skin and don’t know how to get out. Iam saying this because every ugly thing in my life still led me to you.”
My lips part, but no sound comes.
He leans closer, his voice dropping, every word weighted with emotion so heavy it feels like it could drag both of us under.
“You are not debt,” he says. “You are not a tally. You are not what they took from you. You are not what your mother sold. You are not the sum of every hand that touched you wrong.”
Tears spill over before I can stop them.
His thumbs catch them, spreading them across my skin like they matter too.
“And if I have to spend the rest of my life tearing those lies out of you one by one,” he whispers, “then I will.”
I am crying openly now, not quietly, not prettily, but the kind of crying that shakes through bone because something inside you has finally been struck in the exact place it has been rotting for years.
Silas sees all of it.
He sees the the terror of wanting to believe him.
He sees the child in me who learned to hear love as bait and still, still wants to trust the way it sounds in his mouth.
He loves me through every second of it, like he is furious that the world ever taught me not to.
Lifting one of his bloodied hands from my face with visible effort, like even that small break in contact costs him something, he takes my wrist, guiding my hand down, pressing my palm against the moth on his skin.
The second I feel it beneath my hand, something in me gives.
Not because I have never touched it before. I have. I know the shape of it now. I know the warmth of his body, the way that hidden piece of him felt like a secret the first time I saw it. But this is different. He is not letting me discover it now. He is placing me there on purpose, making me feel it, makingme understand what he is trying to say without hiding behind anything softer.
His hand stays over mine.
