There is no stopping him.
His arm is iron under my hands, all that controlled violence I know too well now suddenly pointed in one clean direction.He doesn’t shove me off. That would be easier. Worse, he turns his head just enough for me to see his face, the look in his eyes enough to tell me that whatever Kadin meant with that gesture, it did exactly what he wanted.
It made this personal in a way the rest of the night had not yet managed.
“Silas,” I say again, my voice thinner now, sharpened by fear. “Please.”
For one awful second, I think that word might be enough.
Tightening his jaw, whatever brief hesitation might have lived in him burns away.
“He threatened you,” he says.
The words are furious.
He pulls free, not violently, just decisively, starting after Kadin toward the back doors with the kind of focus that makes the space around him feel dangerous to enter. My heart is pounding too hard now, every beat full of the same terrible certainty. Kadin wanted this. Maybe not all of it, but enough. Enough to lure. Enough to provoke. Enough to make Silas choose movement over restraint.
I go after him anyway.
There is no version of this where I stay on the dance floor and let the two of them disappear behind closed doors while the music keeps playing and everyone else keeps pretending the night is still beautiful. My heels catch awkwardly on the edge of my dress as I move, breath already gone shallow, the room around us blurring into startled faces and confused glances.
Behind me, I hear Cheyenne say my name.
Maria too.
Neither of them matters right now.
Only the back door does. The one Kadin slipped through. The one Silas is heading for with murder in his spine and no roomleft in him for anything except the image of Kadin pointing at me and promising harm.
The music keeps going.
The dance floor keeps turning.
The whole formal keeps pretending it is still elegant and safe while I chase the most dangerous man I know toward a door that suddenly feels like the mouth of something much worse.
CHAPTER 40
Octavia
“Silas, stop.”
The plea tears out of me the second my hand catches his arm.
Cold air hits hard the moment we spill through the back doors. The music from the formal dulls behind us, muffled by brick and distance until it sounds unreal, like some other life still carrying on without us. The parking lot stretches under weak yellow lights, too empty, too quiet, too exposed. Rows of parked cars sit in silence. The whole place feels staged the instant I really look at it.
Silas barely seems to notice any of it.
His body is all forward motion, every line of him drawn tight with purpose. The knot of his tie has been dragged loose in the rush outside, fabric hanging open at his throat. A dark piece of hair has fallen across his forehead. He looks disordered, dangerous, too far gone to care what he looks like. Fear settles low in my stomach the second I realize how little of him is still in this moment with me.
Then his hand goes into his pocket.
Metal catches the light.
A knife.
The sight hollows me out instantly.
It is not a big blade. That almost makes it worse. Something small enough to hide, small enough to carry, small enough to use before anybody gets the chance to stop him. My fingers close harder around his wrist, every nerve in me turning to ice.
