Page 106 of Vows of Silence

It was an illusion of choice. And I’d fallen for it.

The bedroom door opened behind me. I didn’t bother to turn around straight away. For some reason, that felt important. Childish, maybe, and completely ridiculous considering he had kidnapped me, locked me in a basement, and apparently returned to bed covered in someone else’s blood, but still, it felt like the only scrap of control I had left. He couldn’t force me to accept him. He couldn’t force my compliance. He may have control over the situation, but he couldn’t control me.

So I stared at the clothes on the floor for one second longer, forcing myself to breathe normally, forcing my hands to remain loose at my sides, and then I slowly turned to face him.

And there he stood in the doorway, a fresh suit on, his mask back in place.

The silver gleamed beneath the soft morning light, beautiful in that cold, unsettling way it always was, but this time my eyes didn’t go to the polished edges or the cruel shape of it. They went straight to the blood smeared along the lower half. It had dried darker in some places, caught in the fine ridges of the metal and gathered near the sharp line of his jaw, as though someone had reached for him with bloody hands, or he had leaned close enough to be marked by whatever violence had taken place before he came back to me.

He looked from my face to the suit jacket still in my hands.

I waited for the panic to come. I waited for the screaming, the demands, the accusations that usually rose up in me faster than common sense could catch them, but none of it came.

Something colder had taken its place, and for once I didn’t hate it. For once, I was grateful for the strange calm wrapping around me, because I knew if I gave him my anger, he would know what to do with it.

If I gave him fear, he would know what to do with that as well.

Silas understood violence, and panic, and survival. He thrived under those.

I couldn’t give him even a scrap of it. Because if I showed anything other than calm, then it would awaken the beast inside him. It would awaken that primal, almost feral urge he had to be in control, to keep me under lock and key.

His gaze dropped again, slower this time, taking in the ripped-back covers, the abandoned clothes, the blood on the sheets I hadn’t bothered to hide.

Good.

Let him see it.

Let him know I knew.

He hadn’t bothered to hide it from me, so why should I hide my knowledge from him?

Unless, of course, he wanted me to know. Unless he wanted me to be aware of his actions. If he didn’t want to hide anything from me? He left this evidence for me to find, after all. Was this his own way of trying to show me what his life was like?

Because if so, he had made a grave mistake. It didn’t help me accept him. If anything, all it had succeeded in doing was pushing me further away.

And, just like he always did, he didn’t leave an explanation. He didn’t justify. He wanted me to work things out for myself—though it was plainly obvious what I was looking at.

It was the aftermath of a brutal murder.

He stepped inside and closed the door behind him, the click of it far too soft for something that sounded so final.

He crossed the room without coming too close to me, though I noticed he placed himself between me and the door as he moved towards the wardrobe.

Of course he did.

Even now, even with blood drying on his mask and his clothes already discarded like evidence, he was aware of everyexit, every angle, every possible route I might take. The knowledge should have made me abandon the thought before it had fully formed.

The silence stretched long enough to become uncomfortable, which was impressive considering silence was the closest thing Silas had to a native language.

And then he finally turned towards the bathroom, leaving the breakfast tray at the end of the bed.

That was when I knew.

Not in some dramatic lightning-bolt moment. There was no sudden rush of bravery, no empowering swell of confidence that made me believe I could outrun him or outsmart him or escape a house I barely understood. It was much quieter than that. Much simpler.

If he went into that bathroom and closed the door, I was leaving.

I didn’t care if I made it ten feet. I didn’t care if there were guards outside, cameras in every corner, cliffs on one side of the property and endless forest on the other. I didn’t care if he caught me before I reached the staircase. I just knew I couldn’t stand in that room for another minute waiting for him to wash someone else’s blood from his skin and return to me as though cleanliness changed anything.