Before they reach the door, Silas speaks again.
“I won’t work for you.”
Echo glances back over one shoulder.
The smile that touches his mouth is small the kind men wear when they think time is on their side.
“We’ll see,” he says.
Then he leaves, taking Roman, the card, the word Catalyst, the name Katya, the Serpent’s Den, all of it, and somehow the room does not feel safer after they’re gone.
It feels larger.
More dangerous.
As though waking up in a hospital bed with Silas alive beside me should have been the end of something, yet instead it has become the beginning of a world much bigger than the motel, bigger than the Handler, bigger than anything I have been ready to survive.
CHAPTER 46
Octavia- 6 months later
The water holds me gently.
Not warm, not cold, just there, a living cradle beneath my back while I float at the edge of the reservoir, looking up into a sky so wide it almost feels impossible that it belongs to the same world as motel rooms, hospital walls, blood on concrete, old terror dragged screaming into daylight. Summer has settled over Spokehaven in a way that softens everything. The sun is high without being cruel. The air smells like freshwater, sunscreen, cut grass somewhere farther up the hill. Voices drift across the lake in bursts, bright and harmless, carried by wind and distance until they become little pieces of laughter instead of anything sharp.
A real breath fills my lungs.
Then another.
They go all the way down now.
That still feels new enough to notice.
The distant sound of my friends playing reaches me in fragments. Cheyenne shrieking at Maria for splashing her too hard. Maria laughing anyway, because of course she is. Some stupid argument about who cheated first at whatever gamethey’ve made up near the shallows. For once, the noise of other people does not make me brace. It folds into the afternoon and stays there, exactly where it should.
Turning my head, I catch sight of Adrian on the dock.
He’s sitting with his canes propped beside him, long legs stretched awkwardly in front of him, the sunlight catching in his hair while he leans down to poke at Maria with the end of one cane every time she gets too close to the dock. She keeps slapping it away. He keeps doing it anyway. The sight of him there still does something strange to my chest. Maybe because when Silas first brought him around, he had looked like a boy who expected every room to spit him back out eventually. Now he looks almost settled. Not fully. I’m not sure boys from places like St. Augustine ever settle fully. Still, there is something softer in the line of him these days.
My parents made the decision quickly once it became clear that “temporarily staying over” was just Adrian’s polite way of pretending he had somewhere else to go. By then Silas and I had already moved into our apartment off campus, ours in a way that still sometimes catches me off guard when I unlock the door. With us gone, my parents had too much space and too much heart to leave him hanging at the edge of it. So Adrian ended up there, half-resisting, half-relieved, pretending my mom's endless snack buying annoys him while eating every bit of it anyway. My dad acts gruffer than he feels. Mom fusses over whether Adrian is resting enough. The whole thing should feel strange. Instead it feels almost inevitable, like my family has quietly become a place where the broken end up if they are lucky enough to be loved by one of us first.
Another deep breath leaves me.
Peace is a delicate thing. I’ve learned that much. It arrives quietly. It asks nothing. It settles best when you don’t move too fast trying to name it.
The sky above me is painfully blue. My body drifts in a lazy little arc, water lapping at my ears, the sun warming my face. For a moment, there is nothing to outrun. No text messages. No recordings. No hospital machines. No ghosts. Only this bright, ordinary summer day and the startling realization that I am inside it fully, not half waiting for it to be taken away.
Then hands find my hips under the water.
A startled laugh catches in my throat before I can stop it. My body jerks slightly, but there is no panic in it, not anymore, because I know those hands the second they touch me. Broad palms. Steady grip. The immediate, possessive warmth of him.
Silas pulls me toward him with no effort at all.
Water slides between us as my back leaves the easy cradle of the lake and meets the hard heat of his chest instead. His hands stay firm at my hips, holding me there while I turn just enough to look at him. Wet hair pushed back. Sunlight turning the sharp planes of his face gold at the edges. The scar at his temple paler now than it was six months ago. The kind of beauty that still catches me off guard because so much of it is made from surviving.
He kisses me before I can say anything.
It isn’t hurried. It isn’t for show, though the others are close enough that somebody is bound to groan dramatically in a second. It is one of those quiet, claiming kisses he gives me when he has already decided the moment belongs to us and the rest of the world can wait until afterward. His mouth tastes faintly of lake water and sunshine.
