Just the faintest shift at the corner of his mouth, the beginning of a smile he doesn’t seem to mean to let me see. After everything, after blood, texts, fear, and the Warden’s voice in my ear, that small curve of warmth feels almost more intimate than the things we did upstairs.
“You want to watch a proper movie?” he asks.
His voice is quieter now, rough still, but the edge has softened. The fury in him hasn’t vanished. I can still feel it there, banked low under the surface, still hot from everything that happened. But for this one moment he lets it sit beside something gentler.
Glancing back at me, his smile deepens just enough to make my chest ache.
“Because if I keep focusing on you,” he whispers, “I think I’m going to carry you right back upstairs…Steph and Jacob do not need another problem tonight.”
The sentence should make me laugh.
Instead it makes heat bloom through me all over again, because I know he means it. Not as a tease. As fact. His restraint is a living thing tonight. I can feel how thin it is every time his eyes rest on my mouth for too long.
Leaning toward him before I can overthink it, I kiss him once.
Just once.
A small kiss. Gentle. Meant more as an answer than an invitation, though the way he exhales against my lips tells me it still lands like one. When I pull back, I stay close enough to feel his breath brush my skin.
“I’d love that,” I whisper.
As I look at him there in the kitchen light, blood still faintly dried along his knuckles, scars hidden under a hoodie, love and violence all somehow living in the same body, only one thought remains.
How could something so gentle have been forced into such a violent life.
CHAPTER 28
Silas- years ago
The apartment always smells worse at night.
During the day, the heat coming through the cracked window and the cigarette smoke from the neighbors upstairs blur it into something almost tolerable. But at night, when everything settles and the air goes still, every bad smell in the place rises at once. Old beer. Mold in the walls. Stale grease. Mildew from the bathroom that never fully dries. The sour, rotten scent of a life left too long in one room with no one coming to save it.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the television, I pretend not to notice any of it.
The TV is one of the few things in the apartment that still works more often than it doesn’t, though “works” is generous. The picture ghosts in and out. Half the channels are static. The volume knob only functions if I hold it at the right angle. Tonight, I’ve got one of the clearer stations limping across the screen. Some late-night rerun with canned laughter, bright kitchen sets, and people arguing in clean clothes, all of them looking like they live on a planet I was never meant to visit.
I keep it on low.
Not because I’m trying to be considerate.
Because if he comes home mean, I need to hear him before I see him.
The room behind me is mostly dark except for the weak blue light from the TV. Our apartment isn’t really big enough to have rooms, not in the way other people mean it. It’s more like one long, badly stitched-together mistake. A living room that doubles as my bedroom. A kitchen corner with a sink stained yellow around the drain. A hallway so narrow you have to turn sideways to get around open doors. His room at the very end, where the mattress sits on the floor and the ashtray on the crate beside it is always full.
The clock on the microwave says 11:43 p.m.
Too late for a good version of him.
Not that there are many good versions left.
My knees are pulled up close, chin resting on them, one sock half-slid off my heel. I haven’t eaten since lunch at school, but there’s nothing in the fridge worth opening it for unless I want mustard, beer, and a jar of pickles floating in gray water. Hunger has stopped feeling urgent anyway. Most things do after long enough.
The laughter from the sitcom rises again, too bright for the room. I almost don’t hear the first scrape at the door.
Then the knob rattles.
Every muscle in my body locks at once.
