Page 99

Or does the world simply keep them counted and quiet and forgotten, the way it intended to keep me?

I think about that island, too, the one our instructor commutes from—the detached northern rock where they warehouse the Omegas with no pack to vouch for them. I asked her about it once, between drills, and she went flat and careful in the way people do around a wound. A holding pen with a prettier name.

Somewhere to file the unclaimed until the system decides what they’re worth.

I understood, in that cold clarifying moment, exactly what the CEO had been counting on when he neglected to mention its existence to my men—that an Omega who turned up there, conveniently ‘lost’ in transit, would be beyond anyone’s reach but his.

It would have been me.

If Doc hadn’t moved first, if Riot hadn’t committed, if Silas hadn’t filed the papers that made me theirs in the eyes of a database—that island is where I’d be tonight, counted and quiet and waiting to be sold. The thought sits in my stomach like a swallowed stone.

I reach the bottom of the stairs, and I’m not alone.

There’s a figure seated on the rug before the fireplace, lit gold and flickering by the low flames, and for a moment my sleep-starved brain can’t place the shape of what he’s doing—the smallrhythmic motion of his long pale hands, the soft click and draw—until it resolves into something so unexpected it stops me on the last step.

Knitting.

Silas is knitting.

Naturally he is. The man who arranges corpses into serenity, who courts a woman with funeral flowers and stitches her dresses in defiant neon, is sitting by a dying fire at three in the morning, working yarn through his fingers with the same unhurried devotion he brings to everything.

The scent of him drifts to me—cold lilies and beeswax and graveyard cedar, that candied-violet sweetness underneath, all of it gentled by the woodsmoke into something almost domestic. I just watch him for a long moment, because I am, helplessly, intrigued by him. By the contradiction he carries so lightly. By how a creature this creative, this delicate-handed, spends his days making the dead beautiful and his nights making warmth out of string.

“Pretty Peony,” he whispers, without turning. He always knows. He scents me the way I read a room—completely, instantly, before I’ve announced a thing.

I don’t answer.

I don’t want to, not yet; I want to hold the stillness a moment longer, this hushed amber pocket of three a.m. where nothing is required of me. He seems to understand that too, because he doesn’t press. He simply looks back over his shoulder, and our eyes meet across the firelight, and the corner of his mouth lifts into something soft and unguarded—not the theatrical grin he wields like a scalpel, but a smaller, truer thing.

I take it as the invitation it is.

I cross the room on silent feet and lower myself onto the rug beside him, close enough to share his warmth and the cedar-sweet cloud of him, and I tuck my knees up and say nothingat all. He returns to his knitting without a word, the needles resuming their patient rhythm, and I find I’m absurdly grateful for it—for a man who doesn’t rush to fill a silence, who lets me simply exist in the quiet beside him without demanding I perform my presence. So few people have ever let me just be in a room.

The ones who did are mostly dead.

We sit like that for a long while, and I watch his hands work—those long pale clever hands that have closed the eyes of murdered men and cut a bodice to flatter my exact frame and, apparently, can coax soft warmth out of nothing but wool and patience.

There’s a hypnosis to the rhythm of it, the loop and pull and slide, and I feel the strategist in my skull finally begin to slow, the frantic pacing easing to something almost like rest.

It strikes me that this is a kind of intimacy I have no vocabulary for. Not the heat Riot gives me, not the certainty Doc provides. Something stiller.

The intimacy of being permitted to sit in silence beside someone and not be afraid. I have been touched in a thousand ways by a hundred people and I am not certain I have ever, before these three, simply been kept company.

“Have you decided,” I ask eventually, my voice low so it doesn’t crack the hush, “what flowers I’ll wear on my end day?”

It’s the kind of question that usually sends him spiraling into delighted morbidity—ranunculus and anemone and hellebore, a whole rhapsody on petals and meaning.

I brace for the performance.

It doesn’t come.

The needles still. He turns his head and looks at me, and the glee isn’t there—none of it, not the bright unhinged sparkle, not the funereal theater. What’s there instead is calm. Genuine, quiet, bottomless calm, a stillness in those amber eyes I’ve neveronce been shown, and the sight of it makes something click into place in my chest with the force of recognition. Because I know that look. I wear its cousin. It’s the face under the face.

Does he have a switch too?

“Crowe,” I whisper, testing it.

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t so much as flicker. And the non-response is the answer—because Crowe is the one who would have answered, the showman, the morbid darling who performs death like a cabaret. Crowe isn’t here right now.