My whole body is ice and fire at once. It remembers being small. It remembers being trapped. It remembers the shape of watching while love becomes a body, then silence, then something no amount of pleading can call back. It remembers the animal certainty that disaster is arriving in real time, that nothing you do is large enough to stop it, that the person on the floor is already halfway elsewhere.
Not him.
Anything but him.
Please, not Silas.
His name tears out of me again, but this time it doesn’t sound like a scream.
It sounds like something in me breaking beyond repair.
CHAPTER 43
Octavia
Silas is dying in front of me.
There is no softness left in that truth. No blur. No drug-thick lag between seeing and knowing. His body is on the floor in a shape that my mind keeps trying to reject even while the rest of me understands it instantly, primitively, the way an animal understands blood in the air. He is twisted onto one side, one arm dragging weakly against the carpet, the wound in his side leaking dark into his shirt, his mouth open on breaths so thin they barely seem to belong to a living person at all. Every second takes something from him. Color. Strength. Time. The pauses between each breath are getting longer, and my body is counting them without asking me.
Too pale.
Too still.
Too quiet.
The Handler keeps me pinned beneath him with one hand in my hair, my face forced toward Silas like this is a lesson I am meant to memorize.
“Look at him,” he murmurs near my ear, his voice low, almost gentle in the vilest possible way. “Pretty boy like that, allbroken open because he couldn’t stop trying to play hero.” His weight settles heavier across my back, calm as stone. “That’s the problem with boys who fall in love with girls like you. They start thinking devotion makes them dangerous.”
A laugh drags out of him, dry and pleased with itself.
“Turns out it just makes them easy.”
The words go through me strangely.
Not cleanly. Not like a blow. Terror is still there, enormous and suffocating, ripping through me every time Silas’s chest barely rises. Grief is there too, clawing against my ribs from the inside. But beneath both of them, something else begins to move. Something older than thought. Older than fear. Something with no language in it at all. No manners. No hesitation. Just the simple, brutal arithmetic of love meeting threat and deciding that one of them has to stop breathing.
His fingers slide through my hair.
“Such a waste,” he says, watching Silas on the floor as if he is looking over damaged furniture. “Built nice. Loyal. Mean enough to be interesting.” His hand trails lower over my shoulder possessively, “Could’ve had some use in him.”
Revulsion flashes through me so hot it nearly burns straight through the terror.
Silas drags in another breath.
It is wet...shallow...not enough.
“Please,” I whisper.
The Handler stills for half a heartbeat.
Not because he believes me.
Because he enjoys it.
That matters.
Everything in me is screaming to fight harder, to buck, claw, twist, force him to spend time controlling me. That has gotten me nothing. That has fed him. Bought him pleasure. Boughthim a better view. Bought Silas less time with each second that passed.
