The edge of his hoodie has slipped enough that I can see faint crescents from my nails high on his chest, little red half-moons scattered over skin I now know in humiliating detail. The sight of them sends a slow pulse of heat through me even now, right alongside the fear. I tug the hoodie down for him without thinking, smoothing it over the evidence. Noticing the gesture,he doesn’t comment on it. Letting his free hand leave my thigh, it settles at the small of my back instead, anchoring me there against him.
“While everyone was over,” I whisper. “The first one came while everyone was over. And then the article about my mom’s grave…” I trail off, because even now saying it aloud makes it feel unreal in the wrong way. “None of this feels like some cruel prank. It feels…” I swallow. “Planned.”
His hand moves slowly over my back, not soothing exactly, but steady enough to keep me from floating too far into panic again. He reads the texts in silence for another second, the line of his mouth going harder with every passing beat.
“She was buried in Spokehaven?” he asks.
“It was the closest cemetery,” I mutter.
The answer sounds absurdly practical. As if proximity and convenience have any place in a conversation about a stolen body and debts that keep crawling out of the dark.
Before he can say anything else, another text flashes across the screen.
My mom.
Running late. Open house. Dad is caught up in a meeting. You and Silas don’t need to wait up for dinner.
The normalcy of it almost makes me laugh. Or cry. I can’t tell which. The message lands in the middle of all this like a postcard from a different life, one where parents run late and daughters wait up and nobody in the house is sitting on a counter in a boy’s shirt while he reads threats off her phone with blood still drying under his nails.
Then another text slides in.
Cheyenne.
Hey. I know you’re clearly going through something, and I hope Kadin is wrong in thinking it’s about Silas. Just know who your real friends are. I will always be here for you.
The guilt hits immediately.
Heavy, I immediately drop my eyes from the screen. Cheyenne’s hurt from earlier is still fresh enough that the words feel deserved and undeserved all at once. She’s trying to reach me. To make herself the safe option again, yet, buried inside that kindness is Kadin, still moving pieces around from outside the room.
Silas sees it too.
His whole body stills in that dangerous way I’m beginning to understand means anger has sharpened into something colder. His eyes lock on the message, the hand on my back pausing for half a second before resuming its slow, measured path.
“Little fucker knew exactly what he was doing,” he murmurs.
The words come out with no heat in them.
That makes them so much worse.
Looking at him, really looking at him, I see the fury sitting just under his skin. Not loud. Not wild. Focused. Kadin didn’t just leave bruises in the hallway and a threat at the bottom of the stairs. He left poison behind, and he did it knowing exactly where it would spread. Through my friends. Through doubt. Through timing. Through the simple, devastating fact that if he can make the people who love me question Silas, he doesn’t have to be near me to keep causing damage.
Silas knows that.
And now so do I.
Brushing his thumb once over the side of my ribs through the shirt, he pulls me a little closer against him. The movement issubtle, almost absentminded, but there is something possessive in the way his arm tightens around my back afterward, as if the act of reading those messages has made him freshly aware of how many things are still reaching for me.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, though I’m not even sure what I’m apologizing for anymore. For the texts. For the panic. For Cheyenne. For dragging him into this. For how quickly my life turns into something ugly enough to splash onto everyone near it.
His head turns toward me immediately.
“No,” he snaps. There is so much certainty in that one word it almost hurts. “None of this is yours to be sorry for.”
The dryer thumps behind us, my phone sitting dark in his hand now.
Even with the fear returning, even with the texts, the grave, and the ugly shape of whatever this is becoming, I can still feel the echo of his heartbeat under my ear from upstairs, still hear the way he said he loved me like it was the only thing in his life he had never lied about.
That is the problem with love, I think.
