So I do.
The numbers come out thin at first, catching on breaths I can barely control. But with each compression, each count, my voice steadies a little. Around us, the party has become a ring of horrified silence broken only by the operator on speaker, Kadin relaying instructions, and the wet slap of Silas’s hands against the boy’s chest.
Somewhere behind me, I hear Cheyenne finally climb out of the pool. Maria is with her. Their wet footsteps slap across the patio, but neither of them comes too close.
The boy’s friend keeps muttering to himself, half prayer, half denial.
“Come on, man. Come on. Come on.”
The night feels suspended.
Silas doesn’t stop. “Stay with me,” he snaps, though he isn’t looking at the boy so much as commanding death itself to back the hell off.
And for the first time since I met him, I understand that whatever darkness lives in Silas did not make him helpless.
It made him dangerous in all the ways survival requires.
The count breaks.
One second I’m still saying the numbers with him, forcing each one out through a throat that feels too tight, and the next something in Silas changes. It is small at first, almost invisible if you aren’t watching him closely. His hand shifts from the center of the boy’s chest to his neck. Two fingers press hard, searching.
Nothing.
He checks again.
Still nothing.
The color drains from his face in a way that makes my stomach sink. Not fear exactly. Not panic. Something worse. A stunned, splintering disbelief, as if his body refuses to accept what his hands are telling him. He starts compressions again anyway, harder now, more desperate than precise. The earlier rhythm is still there, but it has frayed. Water flies from his sleeves with each downward shove, his breathing turning rough.
“Come on,” he mutters, not to us, not even really to the boy. To the moment itself. To whatever God decides these things. “Come on.”
The patio has gone nearly silent around us. Kadin is still on the phone, voice hoarse as he relays updates to the operator, but the sound feels distant. The boy’s friend is crying openly now, hands shaking at his mouth. Cheyenne and Maria stand a few feet away, pale and dripping pool water onto the concrete, both of them looking sick.
Silas checks for a pulse again.
Nothing.
This time it hits him.
His shoulders lock as his face goes strangely blank for half a second, then not blank at all. Frazzled. Cracked open. Shock bleeding through the hard edges he wears like armor. He looks suddenly too young, too dangerous, and far too drunk to be here when authorities arrive.
Then…I hear it.
Sirens.
Faint at first, before growing louder.
My whole body goes cold in a different way than the pool ever managed. It is not the boy anymore, not for one split second. It is Silas. The Warden. Conditions. Rules. Courts. Everything he said in the car about one mistake being enough to drag him back under.
If the ambulance and police come and they ask questions, he cannot be kneeling here soaked through, drunk and already on thin ice with the system.
He cannot be the last thing they remember about this boy.
My hands move before the thought is fully finished. Fingers close hard around Silas’s forearms, wet flannel bunching beneath my grip.
“Silas, we have to go.”
He doesn’t look at me. He barely seems to hear it. His hands hover over the boy’s chest like he still plans to keep going until somebody physically drags him away.
