He slows, each thrust a molten drag now instead of a violent slam, drawing out every last pulse. Our foreheads touch, breath mingling, sweat slick between our chests. His hands cradle my face, thumbs stroking along my jaw while my legs stay locked around his hips, the world narrows to the steady grind and the quiet, reverent curses he murmurs into my mouth. He kisses me, softer than the hunger that started this, tongue tasting the tremble he loves so much. I cling like the gravity in him is the only thing holding me upright.
Blood is not thicker than water.
People say it like blood means safety, like the people who made you are the ones most meant to protect you. Maybe that is true for other lives. Other families. Other children. But blood, in my world, has only ever meant inheritance in the cruelest sense. Pain passed down like scripture. Damage handed over like duty. A mother’s debts. A father’s violence. Names we never chose deciding what our bodies were worth.
If blood were all that mattered, I would still belong to her.
If blood were all that mattered, Silas would still belong to the dead man who carved his misery into him and called it love.
But he doesn’t.
And neither do I.
Right now, none of that feels more real than this.
The art room is still around us, the scent of paint, dust, and sex hanging in the quiet, the edge of the worktable pressing cool against my back while his body stays over mine, heavy in the best way, grounding in the way only he knows how to be. My skin is still humming. My pulse is still trying to slow. Every place he touched me feels awake, not in shame, not in fear, but in that deep, trembling way that makes me feel more inside my body than outside of it for once.
When the last quiver fades, he stays inside of me.
His forehead dips to mine. His nose brushes against it, wrecked and intimate enough to break something open in my chest all over again. His voice, when it comes, is ruined by feeling.
“I can’t quit you,” he whispers. “You’re in my blood.”
The words settle into me like a vow and prayer all at once.
Because blood has taken enough from us. Blood has carried enough violence. Enough ruin. Enough ghosts. And still, somehow, here he is, giving the word back to me in a shape that does not feel like inheritance or ownership or debt.
It feels like devotion.
My fingers trace his face, my eyes searching his, still full of all the things he does not know how to hide from me anymore.
“If I’m your addiction, Silas,” I breathe, “then you’re mine.”
Something in his expression softens and shatters at the same time.
That is the truth of us, maybe. Not clean. Not healthy in the way ordinary people would mean it. But real. Real in the way blood never was. Real in the way choice is. In the way hunger becomes holy when the person touching you knows every broken part and still stays.
Blood is not thicker than water.
Not when blood only ever taught us how to bleed.
This is thicker.
This, with his mouth still near mine, his body wrapped around mine, and his love laid bare enough that I can feel it in every breath between us, is stronger than anything we were born into.
And right now, with the whole world waiting outside this locked classroom to become ugly again, this is all that matters.
CHAPTER 33
Silas
Maybe I am still high on her.
Maybe it is the memory of Octavia in that locked classroom, flushed and trembling, looking at me like I was something chosen instead of something survived. Maybe it is the sight of her in the hallway before, chin up, blood on her knuckles from where she hit Kadin, all that fury in her small frame like she had been waiting her whole life for someone to dare her to bite. Maybe that is what has me moving through campus like a blade with a pulse, smiling at secretaries, skipping classes, learning his route one harmless question at a time.
It does not matter.
What matters is this: danger does not get to linger around her just because it learned how to speak softly. Men like Kadin always think they can dress desire up as concern and make girls grateful for being watched. They think attention is flattering if they use the right tone. They think pain leaves a door unlocked.
