His eyes settle on me more fully. When he speaks again, there’s something steadier underneath the caution. Not softness exactly. Something stronger.
“We can keep this conversation between you and me,” he whispers. “Steph and Octavia are safe. That’s what matters.”
The sentence lands like a hand on the back of my neck.
Not permission. Not blessing. Trust offered carefully, in the smallest amount he can live with, because whatever he suspects or already knows, he has decided the immediate truth is this: the women in this house are not in danger tonight.
And somehow that faith feels more terrifying than accusation.
Exhaling slowly, the weight of the whole evening seems to settle deeper into his shoulders.
“Don’t let the demons drag her down ever again,” he warns. “Keep her safe…”
A pause.
Then, quieter, and somehow more devastating for it:
“…and I’ll keep you safe.”
For a second I can’t say anything at all.
Because there it is, tucked inside the warning and the impossible request. Care. Not just for her. For me too. Not blind. Not foolish. Care that knows exactly how ugly the world can be and still chooses, somehow, to make room for one more wounded thing under its roof.
Leaving, the room feels different after he’s gone.
Heavier.
With Octavia asleep against me and her father’s words still living in the air, one truth settles in my chest with a force I can’t ignore.
Whatever this is now, whatever we are becoming, it no longer belongs only to desire and damage.
Now it carries trust too.
CHAPTER 30
Silas
What unsettles me most about Jacob isn’t the warning he gave me.
It’s the fact that he trusted me enough to give one at all.
A man like him could have made the whole thing ugly if he wanted to. Could have dragged me out of the house, could have looked at Octavia asleep on my chest and decided whatever else he suspected didn’t matter next to the simple visual of his daughter tangled around a man he took in out of obligation and old blood. Instead, he poured coffee this morning like none of it had happened. Asked if I wanted eggs. Asked if I slept. Then, with that same maddening calm, suggested that maybe sometime when the girls did one of their all-day things, he and I could catch a movie.
Like I hadn’t spent the night with my mouth on his daughter.
Like he hadn’t told me to keep her safe.
Now the house is too quiet, and his words keep coming back anyway.
Steph and Jacob are gone. Octavia is upstairs getting ready for school. The kitchen is full of the leftovers of a morning that felt almost normal if I ignored the fact that the only reason I could act normal at all was because I’d spent half the night trying and failing not to go back into her room after I carried her to bed. Coffee sits on the table cooling beside me. The shower I took at three in the morning did nothing but make me more aware of how deeply she got into my skin. The mirror offered me the same face as always. A little meaner. A little more wrecked. A little too hungry for a girl upstairs in one of my shirts.
And underneath all of that are the texts.
The article.
The image of her face when she looked at the screen and went white in a way no one else in the room understood. The way she shook after, not just with fear, but with recognition. That message reached straight into her past and came back carrying pieces she has spent years trying to bury. Every time I think about it, every instinct in me goes taut again.
Keep her safe.
