Then they close again.
“No.” My hand lands against his cheek, light at first, then firmer when fear spikes all over again. “No, stay. Stay with me. Silas, look at me. Look at me.”
Blood has dried tacky over my arms now, mine mixed with the Handler’s until there is no separating them by touch. Somewhere behind us the Handler keeps making those wet, diminishing sounds against the bed frame, but they might as well belong to another world. Nothing exists except this terrible in-between Silas is trapped inside, this narrow ledge between surviving and slipping somewhere I cannot follow.
Then his eyes open again.
This time they find me.
Not instantly. Recognition comes slowly, painfully, in pieces. Through haze. Through agony. Through the chemical wreckage still dragging at him from the inside. I see the exact second my face becomes recognizable to him. See awareness gather. See horror flash through what he finds there, because he is looking at me and seeing the blood all over me, the room around us, the evidence of what almost happened while he was forced to drown in his own body.
His lips part.
No sound comes out.
My forehead falls to his, tears spilling down onto both our faces.
“You’re here,” I whisper, the words coming apart on the way out. “You’re here. You’re here.”
His next breath shudders through him from end to end. One arm lifts weakly, a broken, delayed effort to reach for me. The movement is so small it would have destroyed me if I had letmyself feel it fully. Catching his hand before it can fall, I hold it in both of mine, pressing it against my cheek like proof.
Relief does not arrive gently.
It hits like violence.
It rips through me so hard it feels like being opened all over again, every second of terror finally collecting its debt at once. Sobs tear out of me in ugly, shattered pieces. Breath leaves in gasps that hurt. My whole body starts to come apart now that his is beginning, slowly, painfully, to come back together. Fear, horror, grief, love, all of it pours through me while he lies there breathing, half-awake, wrecked, alive beneath my hands.
Alive.
That word swallows everything else. The blood, the room, the pain splitting through my side, the Handler gurgling somewhere behind us, the years of old terror this night has dragged up by the roots. None of it is bigger than that one fact.
He's Alive.
CHAPTER 44
Silas
Consciousness does not return all at once. It claws its way back in fragments, violent little bursts of sensation that feel less like waking than being dragged upward by hooks.
First comes the ache in my lungs.
Then the taste, chemical bitterness still clinging to the back of my throat, acid from the floor, blood somewhere in the air.
Then her voice.
Not words at first. Only the sound of her breaking around my name.
Opening my eyes into a blur, lights blur, the ceiling sliding sideways above me. For one disoriented second I cannot remember where I am, only that something is terribly wrong because Octavia sounds like that. Then her face comes into focus over mine, and the whole world narrows down to one impossible, devastating fact.
She is covered in blood.
It is everywhere.
Smeared across her mouth like she bit straight through somebody. Dried at the corner of her jaw. Streaked over herthroat, her collarbone, her hands. Splashed over the ruined black fabric of her dress. Her hair is tangled, half stuck to her cheeks in damp dark strands. There are bruises already rising on her arm, clear finger marks, ugly even in the motel’s yellow light, the kind of bruises that tell their own story in one glance.
For one heartbeat I feel relief so sharp it hurts, because she is alive, she is here, she is looking at me.
Then the rest of it lands.
