My phone is sitting where I must have abandoned it last night, half-hidden on Silas’s dresser. I grab it, grateful for the distraction, but the relief vanishes the second the screen lights up. Message after message floods in from Cheyenne and Maria, along with a number I don’t recognize until I read the first line.
Kadin.
My stomach twists.
Thumb trembling, I scroll through the thread, skimming frantic check-ins, drunken apologies turned sober concern, fragmented details from the aftermath. One message, repeated in different forms by all three of them, lodges itself in my chest hard enough to make me stop breathing for a second.
He did not make it.
The room goes still.
My mouth goes dry. I swallow against something bitter climbing up my throat, but it doesn’t help. The boy from the patio. The one Silas was trying to drag back with his bare hands while everyone else froze...dead.
My grip on the phone tightens until my knuckles hurt.
That boy died in front of us.
That boy died with Silas’s hands on him, with mine counting compressions, with all of us waiting for sirens and praying for time to move faster. There is nowhere for the horror of that to go. It just stays.
When I force myself to look at the time, a whole new kind of panic arrives.
7:00 a.m. Monday.
Silas’s first day at Spokehaven.
We have one hour.
The thought slams me back into motion. I shove off the bed, still wrapped in yesterday’s wrinkled shirt, and head straight for the door. My fingers close around the handle at the same time it swings inward from the other side.
I walk directly into him.
The impact is immediate, solid enough to knock a breath out of me. My hands fly up instinctively, colliding with warm skin instead of fabric, and when I look up, every thought in my head dies at once.
Silas stands in the doorway fresh from the shower, water still slipping from his hair before moving down the planes of his throat. A towel is secured low around his waist, doing very little to make the situation easier on me. In the dark last night, his body had been all shadows, flashes of skin, scars and heat.Morning light is crueler. It reveals everything. The span of his shoulders. The hard lines of his stomach. The faded violence written into him in pale marks and old damage.
His hair is pushed back, damp and darker than usual, exposing the scars near his temples more clearly. His expression is still clouded with sleep and confusion, like he hadn’t expected to find me on the other side of the door either.
For one unbearable second, neither of us speaks.
My gaze betrays me almost instantly, catching where the towel sits on his hips before I force it back up to his face. The memory of last night flashes so vividly it makes my skin burn. His hands on my thighs. His mouth low on my stomach. His voice against my skin.
There’s no way to stop myself from turning red.
The muffled sound of my parents moving around downstairs saves me from having to say anything coherent. Cabinets opening. Footsteps. The ordinary sounds of morning crashing into the silence between us hard enough to break it.
Without trusting myself to form a single normal sentence, I slip past him into the hallway, making a desperate retreat for the bathroom. The floor is cold under my feet. My pulse is not even pretending to behave. I do not look back.
The bathroom door closes behind me with just enough force to sound accidental. Only then do I let myself lean over the sink and stare at my own reflection.
My face is flushed. My hair is a disaster. There are bruises at my hips and too much memory sitting in my mouth.
Somewhere right outside that door is Silas, fresh from the shower, sober enough to remember or cruel enough to deny it, and I have no idea which possibility is worse.
By the time I make it downstairs, the house has fully committed to pretending this is a normal Monday morning.
Coffee brews somewhere in the background. The toaster had clearly done its best before I gave up halfway through and settled for tearing into a waffle that is still cold in the middle. Light spills through the kitchen windows in that pale, early way that makes everything look too clean, too untouched by what happened last night.
I know better.
