I nod, slow, the understanding settling deep and certain.
“So you’re Silas,” I breathe, like I’ve finally cracked a cipher I didn’t know I’d been reading for weeks.
And there it is—the genuine uplift at the corner of his mouth, small and real and warmer than any grin Crowe has ever flashed me.
“You understand exactly how alike we are, don’t you,” he murmurs. He lets it sit, then adds, softer still, “But you knew that already. You knew the first time I called you Sweet Peony and meant it.”
I say nothing, which is its own confession, and his smile spreads by a fraction as he turns back to the fire and lets us both stare into it.
Two performers.
Two splintered, costumed creatures who learned to build a louder self to keep the world from touching the quiet one underneath.
He has a Crowe the way I have a Vex—the bright dangerous mask that walks point so the true thing can hide behind it. We recognized each other across a corpse weeks ago and have been circling the recognition ever since. It should frighten me, being this transparent to anyone.
With him, it feels instead like being read in a language I thought no one else alive could speak.
And there’s a comfort in it that goes bone-deep, because the others love me too—I don’t doubt that anymore, can’t, not after collars and accounts and a killer who’d die before he broke his word—but they love me from the outside of this particular thing.
Riot would tear apart anyone who threatened my pieces.
Doc would build me a fortress and hand me the only key.
But neither of them has lived inside a self that splits, has felt the lurch of surfacing in a room with no memory of how the body got there, has had to perform a person so the realer one could survive.
Silas has.
Silas knows the exact texture of it, the loneliness of being several and letting the world meet only the loudest. He isn’t soothing a wound he’s read about in a file. He’s showing me his own matching scar in the firelight and telling me, without a trace of pity, that I’m not the only monster in the house wearing more than one face.
“Why can’t you sleep, Darling?” he asks, gentle, the needles resuming their soft rhythm.
I know why. The why is sitting on my chest like a stone, has been all night, and it frightens me precisely because naming it makes the approaching reality real—the deadline, the ex-husband, the inevitable burst of this golden bubble. But Silas doesn’t lie to me, so I find I don’t want to lie to him.
“I’m coming to realize,” I admit, the words quiet and raw, “that I don’t want to lose any of you.”
There it is.
The thing I’ve been turning from for two weeks, said out loud into a sleeping house. I look at him when I say it, and he meets my gaze without a flicker of doubt, steady as bedrock.
“And what,” he says, with quiet, lethal confidence, “makes you think we’re the type to lose, in the game of life?”
I can’t answer that.
I have no counter. He reaches over, then, and lightly strokes my cheek with the backs of two long fingers—and it’s the touch that makes me realize a tear has slipped loose and tracked down my face without my permission.
I hadn’t felt it fall. I never do, anymore; the crying happens to me now like weather, without my consent.
“Hired to sacrifice,” he muses, brushing the wet track away with his thumb, his voice a low velvet thing in the firelight, “only to find, somewhere along the way, that you might actually like the very people sent to collect you. It’s a disorienting thing, isn’t it, when the weapon turns out to have a heartbeat.” His amber eyes hold mine, and there’s nothing of the showman left in them. “Which raises the question you’ve been lying awake chewing on. The one you won’t say. Who has the bigger obsession, in the end. Us?—”
He leans in.
Slow, deliberate, giving me every chance to pull away that I have no intention of taking, and brushes his lips against mine—once, light as a question—before he presses in and gives me a firm, certain kiss, his hand cradling my jaw, the cedar-and-candied-violet of him flooding my senses until the whole dark house narrows to the warm point where we meet.
“—or you?” he finishes, against my mouth.
We share a look, heated and unhurried, the fire popping somewhere beside us, and I have to swallow against the lump rising in my throat—because he’s right, the infuriating, beautiful creature, and the truth of it is the thing I came down the stairs trying to outrun. I am as obsessed with them as they are with me.
More, maybe.
