Nothing in him betrays what just happened except the slight flush still high on his throat and the fact that I know exactly how his mouth felt against my skin a second ago.
I stand frozen in the kitchen, phone pressed to my ear, ice cream carton sweating in my hand, while he walks away like he has all the time in the world. The wood creaks softly under his weight as he climbs the stairs. Halfway up, he rolls his shoulders once, hoodie hanging open, then, keeps going without looking back.
At the top landing, he disappears into the dark hall.
A second later, his bedroom door shuts.
Not loud. Not dramatic.
Just a quiet click that somehow wrecks me more than if he had slammed it.
“Octavia?” Kadin says, the sound of my own name jerking me back into my body.
I swallow, hard. My throat feels scraped raw. “Yeah,” I say, but my voice comes out thin and breathless.
Because downstairs I am still standing in the exact spot where he touched me and upstairs he has already gone to bed like he didn’t just mark me with two words, leaving me shaking in my parents’ kitchen.
CHAPTER 17
Octavia
Idon’t remember crossing the hallway.
One second I’m in the kitchen with melted ice cream soaking through my tank top, my pulse hammering against the inside of my ribs while Kadin’s voice keeps asking if I’m still there, and the next I’m at Silas’s door, pounding on it hard enough that my knuckles sting. The call ended seconds ago, but it doesn’t feel over. Nothing feels over. My skin is still hot where his fingers slid through my hair. My body is still lit up in all the wrong places, aching with a need I am too angry to name properly. Every emotion in me has bled together so completely that I can’t separate humiliation from desire or rage from want. I only know I cannot sit with it by myself.
So I knock again.
And again.
The door opens so suddenly I nearly fall into him.
My hands slap flat against his bare chest before either of us can stop it. The contact shocks a breath out of me. His skin is warm, warmer than it should be, and I feel everything all at once. The hard line of muscle. The uneven ridges of scars. The steady rise of his breathing under my palms. For one brief, sickeningsecond, I just stand there touching him like I’ve been trying to get back to this exact point all night.
Then I shove myself off him.
The force of it is more for me than for him.
Taking a step back, I force myself to look anywhere but lower, because his sweats are hanging off his hips in that lazy, careless way that should not matter and does. The tattoo he keeps hidden from me curls darkly along his lower stomach, vanishing beneath the waistband before my eyes can make enough of it. I hate that I notice it. I hate that even now, furious and humiliated, part of me still wants to know what the rest of it looks like.
“Can I help you?” he asks.
His voice is thick with alcohol, but not sloppy. It’s worse than that. Controlled enough to sound intentional. As if he has all the time in the world to stand there half-naked in the doorway and pretend he doesn’t know exactly what he did to me downstairs.
He has to be joking.
He has to be, because the alternative is that he really is capable of touching me like that and then looking at me as if I’m the one who showed up uninvited.
“Where do you get off?” I ask. The words come out shaking harder than I want them to.
The second I hear my own voice, memory starts bleeding into the present. Not just the kitchen. Not just the car. Older things. Other men. Other hands. The old, nauseating feeling of being watched, handled, weighed for what could be taken. For one awful second, all of that rises to the surface at once.
Am I just another body to him?
Just another body a man can press his hunger into and call it need?
My eyes flick up, catching the mirror leaning against the wall behind him. In it, I can see the ruined angles of him from theside, the broad spread of his shoulders, the dark edge of Medusa on his back, and that thought stumbles.
No.
