Coughing, I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand, trying to pull in a real breath. It doesn’t come easily. My whole chest feels locked. The room is too bright now. Too loud. Too full of other people watching me break.
Silas crouches lower beside me, still touching my back, his voice the first thing that cuts through cleanly.
“What happened?”
I shake my head once, not because I don’t want to answer, but because I can’t form anything coherent enough to survive saying aloud. My hand points uselessly toward where the phone must have fallen.
“The phone,” I manage.
The words scrape out of me thin and ruined.
Silas reaches for it instantly.
I see his hand close around it from the corner of my eye. I see the screen turn toward him. Then I see his whole body go still.
Not subtly.
Completely.
His eyes widen in a way I have learned to fear, because it means whatever he is looking at has gone beyond anger and into something colder, something that cuts so deep it takes a second to even become fury.
For one suspended beat, nobody says anything.
Then the phone starts ringing.
Silas answers before the noise has the chance to settle into the room.
The movement is sharp enough to make all three of us flinch. One second he is crouched beside me with my phone in his hand, my vomit cooling on the floor beside us, the next he is standing, the phone pressed hard to his ear, every line of his body pulled so tight that he looks less like a person and more like a statue.
“Listen, fucker-”
The words come out low and vicious before whatever he hears stops him cold.
It happens so quickly that for a second I think I imagined it. The fury doesn’t leave his face. It changes temperature. Drains down into something flatter, more dangerous, more terrifying because of how completely it stills him. His jaw locks. His eyes go distant in that way people’s eyes do when they are no longer in the room with you but somewhere worse.
“Silas, what-”
A single shake of his head cuts me off.
No.
The gesture is small, but it lands hard enough to make dread break open fully in my chest.
That should have been enough to keep me still. It isn’t. I push myself upright anyway, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, my whole body shaking with the aftermath of what I just saw on the screen. My stomach still feels hollowed out. The image of my mother’s dug-up body is burned into me so deeply that blinking does nothing to get rid of it. Maria is standing nearthe bed with both hands clamped over her mouth, white-faced and useless with shock. Cheyenne is already moving toward me on instinct, because that is what Cheyenne does when things get too bad to think through first.
“Cheyenne,” Silas says, his voice so tight it sounds like it is being forced through clenched teeth, “grab her.”
Fear turns instantly into anger.
“What the fuck is it, Silas?” The question rips out of me louder than I mean it to, the last scraps of my control fraying all at once. “What are you hearing?”
Still he doesn’t answer.
For one terrible second, all I can hear is the blood in my own ears and the static crackle bleeding faintly from the speaker on the phone. Then, with visible effort, Silas pulls the phone away from his ear and taps the call onto speaker.
At first, the sound doesn’t register properly.
Not because it’s unclear. Because my brain refuses it.
