Page 133 of Rage
The words land quietly. The way the worst things always land—not with noise but with weight, settling into the room like something that was already there.
I don’t move.
“For how long?” I say.
He doesn’t answer immediately. When he does, it is with the honesty of someone who has decided they owe it. “Indefinitely,” he says. “At Silas’s discretion.”
Indefinitely.
I sit up.
I look at him in the gray morning light, at the man who sat in a white room for years and decided, from a photograph, to choose me. Who stepped out of shadows in dark quads. Who left notes under doors. Who counted my breaths in the dark and stayed until the nightmare stopped and then left before I could thank him for it.
“I’m not going to let that happen,” I say.
He looks at me with something that is not quite a smile, not quite grief, but lives between the two. “Amy.”
“No,” I say. “You do not get to be calm about this. You do not get to have made every decision for months and then sit there and accept this one like it is already finished.”
He watches me.
“I’m going to talk to Azriel. And Valen. And whoever else needs to be talked to. I’ll tell you everything, but you have to trust me.”
He is quiet for a long moment.
Then he says, “I know you will try.”
I hear what is underneath it. The years in a locked room. The resignation of someone who has learned that the institutions that contain him are larger than anything one person can argue against.
“I’m not going to try. I’m going to do it.”
I put my hand back on his chest.
“You protected me. The least I can do is choose you back when the room has a door.”
Something breaks open in his face, just for a second, just long enough for me to see it. Then it is gone, and the controlled stillness is back, but I saw it.
He pulls me back down against him, and his arm tightens around me. I press my face to his chest, and I feel his heartbeat under my palm, steady and slow, and I think about white rooms and ledgers and family connection indices and the reckoning of a life that was designed to have no one in it.
He lifts my chin with one finger and says, “Lie on your back and spread your fucking legs. I think I need to remind you I’m not going anywhere.”
“Saint…”
“You said you’re not hurt.”
I shake my head. “I’m not.”
“Then lie on your back and spread your fucking legs.”
I do as he says. I’m clad in a band T-shirt. No panties. No bra. The way he likes it since I’ve been staying with him.
This is the part of him I crave. The part where the softness melts away, leaving the darkness of who he is underneath.
I spread my legs, and he settles between them, pulling the band of his shorts down to release his cock.
He fists himself, eyes pinned to my pussy like he’s making sure my pussy is wet enough to fuck.
When he is satisfied, he pushes the head of his cock inside hard and deep.
