Chapter 32

Chapter Thirty-Two

Clarity settled over her as she counted the water droplets beading in her eyelashes. Would a man who’d betrayed her come to her rescue? Maybe. But a man who betrayed her wouldn’t care if she went into shock. A man who didn’t care wouldn’t hold her hair as she vomited wine and glazed carrots and bile. A man who didn’t care wouldn’t climb into a shower with her and rock her until her tears dried.

Whatever else Silas was, for some reason, in some way, he cared.

Even if that care was paper-thin and conditional, something ravenous in her lunged for it.

Her voice was as raw as her throat when she asked, “Did you tell Vanderpoel that Max was my uncle?”

Silas didn’t waste time sputtering, being offended, or asking her why she suspected him. His answer came immediately, plainly. “No, baby.”

Petra’s neck lost its ability to hold her head up. Silas shifted, adjusting them so she could rest her head on the meat of his shoulder. “I didn’t think so,” she whispered.

Apparently sensing that she was no longer about to shatter into a million pieces, Silas’s arms loosened enough for him to stroke her sides, her stomach, her upper thighs — anywhere he could reach, really.

“It’s okay if you did,” he rasped.

“You’re not mad?”

He snorted. “Baby, if you didn’t suspect me, you’d be stupid. And you’re not stupid.”

They were quiet for a moment. She licked the taste of fresh water off her lips and forced herself to take several deep breaths before she spoke again. “I don’t know what to do now.”

“The only thing you need to think about is rest. I know it’s a new concept for you, but I trust you’ll be able to manage it,” he replied, a note of his usual sardonic drawl coming back into his hoarse voice.

Petra lifted a shaking hand to scrub at her face. “You’re being weirdly nurturing. Stop it.”

“Fuck you. I can be nurturing if I want.” There was no heat in his voice but an unnerving intensity in the kiss he dropped on her shoulder. “You can’t stop me.”

Although it was disconcerting, Petra didn’t actually want him to stop. Even if it was all an illusion that could be dispelled at any time, she clung to the reassurance this new side of Silas offered.

Pressing on her eyes to relieve some of the sting, she asked, “Where are we?”

“I brought you home.”

Petra dropped her hand. Eyes popping open, she managed to lift her head just enough to give him an incredulous look. “You what?”

“I brought you home,” he repeated, like that was a normal thing to say and that she’d have any idea what that actually meant. “You needed a healer, so I brought you to my clan.”

His clan?

He’d mentioned something about his father, but she’d barely registered the strangeness of it in the moment. Now, though, Petra went into a different kind of shock. “Where are we, exactly?”

“Small town in the Smoky Mountains.” He rubbed his lips over her shoulder, back and forth through the warm water that poured over them both. His curls hung in dark tendrils around the blunt points of his ears and coiled against the pale skin at the nape of his neck, tempting her to trace their strange, alien shapes with the tips of her fingers.

“This is my house. Well, one of them. I own houses all over the world, but this is home. No one can touch you here.”

Her heart thundered. For a moment, Petra really couldn’t tell if she was going to be sick again. It wasn’t fear that turned her stomach this time, but some other intense feeling too multi-layered for her to put her finger on. Her voice was barely a whisper under the patter of the water when she asked, “Why’d you bring me here, Silas?”

He lifted his head to give her a fierce scowl. “What’d you mean why? You were shot. You needed healing.”

Her memories were disjointed and stretched into unrecognizable shapes by pain and shock, but Petra thought she recalled an argument between Silas and Rasmus about that very subject.

“You could have taken me to any healer,” she protested, not entirely sure why she needed to get clarity on the subject other than the fact that it felt important. “I remember hearing Rasmus’s voice. He knows healers. He could have called Healer M?—”

“No.” Silas’s expression darkened into something thunderous. Those luminous, sinister eyes peered at her, but she wasn’t entirely certain it was the man who looked out from within them. “I’ll say this once and only once, little goddess: when it comes to your life, I don’t trust anyone but clan.”

Petra didn’t have the courage to ask him why. She didn’t want to argue, either, even knowing that the smarter and more convenient choice probably would have been to involve Margot or Healer Mason, her second-in-command and former mentor.

Except then they would know you’re a murderer.

That gave her pause. It was a new and uncomfortable thing to realize she had a new title, let alone one of such profound emotional and societal weight. But the more she rolled it around in her head, the less she cared about the title itself and more the avalanche of consequence it came with.

There was no guilt for Antonin’s death, only the floating feeling of grief for the new sort of life she would now have to live.

Silas was probably right to not let anyone in San Francisco or even the greater Elvish Protectorate heal her. Unless they were fully under the table and therefore untrustworthy, there was every chance they could report her injuries to Patrol. Even if by some miracle she wasn’t recognized, she could still be reported simply for the anomaly of being shot in a territory that boasted its safety every chance it got.

In that light, going to Margot, who was not only a healer but the co-ruler of said territory, was an absolutely asinine thing to do.

There was no way she’d simply patch Petra up and send her on her merry way, no questions asked. And if Petra had to start answering those inevitable questions, then everything else would unravel.

A headache began to throb in the back of her skull. Exhausted by the sheer scale of her problems, she let out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

Silas held very still for a moment. She got the impression that she’d shocked him. She’d shocked herself, too. Not by being grateful, per se, but by how much she trusted him to have made the right choice when she couldn’t.

“C’mon,” Silas growled, slowly helping her stand.

Her legs felt like jelly and she slumped against him as he peeled her out of her nightgown. His hands were gentle but firm as he helped her wash. When he discovered that his black claws scraping her scalp as he worked shampoo into her hair made her melt, he drew the task out as she leaned her whole weight against him.

While he worked, she skimmed her fingers over the new, tender skin of her side. He’d been careful there, too, using a washcloth to cleanse the area so cautiously, it was like he actually feared the wound would split open if he pressed just a bit too hard.

She didn’t care that she was nude and vulnerable with him in a way she hadn’t been before. He’d seen her at her worst, her weakest. What did it matter?

It was hard to be self-conscious when the man stood in the shower with her, still wearing a pair of soaked briefs, and meticulously massaged conditioner into her hair. It was harder still to find any awkwardness when he turned off the shower, ran a towel over every inch of her, opened a fresh toothbrush for her, and then hauled her into his arms to put her back to bed.

She watched him from under the blankets, her eyelids heavy, as he prowled around the brightly lit room.

It was a nice bedroom. Simple. Lots of natural wood and whitewashed, textured walls. The furniture was obviously handmade and well-crafted, the lines masculine but natural in a way that spoke of another century. If she’d expected some sort of deep, dank lair, she would have been sorely disappointed by the minimalist rustic luxury that was Silas’s bedroom.

Her attention strayed from him occasionally, taking in the verdant greenery that shimmered in the breeze just outside the partially opened window or the simple linen curtains that whispered against each other in the breeze. Mostly she watched him, though.

Silas looked tired. The lines of his face were taut, strained. Even the skin around his horns appeared tighter than normal as he roughly towel-dried his curls and then stripped out of his wet underwear.

She admired the gorgeous, perfect curve of his ass as he dug around in his dresser for clothing, as well as the flex and contraction of his back muscles when he donned said clothing.

It should have been hard to reconcile the man before her with the shadow monster who’d appeared like a vengeful god in the belltower, but it wasn’t. Something fundamental in her recognized that they were one and the same. He was a vengeful god forged of shadow and malice, but he was a man, too.

When he turned back to the bed, now dressed in a plain white t-shirt and low-slung, well-worn blue jeans, his feet bare and his hair still damp, she realized that it didn’t bother her.

Silas, man and monster, was the only one looking out for her and… she liked him. A lot. Not in spite of what he was, but because of it.

“Here.” Silas trotted back to her side and drew her attention to the nightstand nearest to her. There was a small collection of things there that she’d been too distracted by him to notice. “Drink that bottle of water and then take those pills. Dad said you’re going to be depleted of a bunch of vitamins and minerals for a while, so you need to take supplements. You should also eat something. It’s been almost a full day since you had anything.”

He helped her sit up and then stuffed the bottle of water and a handful of colorful pills into her hands. Petra didn’t argue but took them dutifully, one by one, under his hawkish gaze.

She’d never been so catastrophically injured before, but she knew that healing wasn’t just a spontaneous thing where one went back to perfectly normal afterwards. Healers worked with what the body provided to close wounds, which meant that when something like blood was lost, they spurred bone marrow to make more at a hyper-fast speed. That meant that some of her fatigue likely came from her body’s sudden depletion of essentials, not just the shock of what happened.

“Now eat,” he instructed, handing her a protein bar as he sat on the edge of the bed by her hip.

She felt a little ridiculous for thinking it, but Petra couldn’t help but feel like Silas was worried. Not the average kind of worry, but the I-haven’t-slept-in-three-day s kind of worry that changed the way one held their shoulders, the curve of their spine. Dark smudges were stark under his eyes. The corners of his mouth were crimped. When he circled the fingers of one hand around her calf over the sheets, his grip was stiff, manacle-like.

Using her thumbnail to open the stiff paper packaging on the bar, she tried to piece together what the events of the last twenty-four hours would have looked like for him.

Her stomach lurched, briefly threatening another meeting with the toilet, when she thought of what he’d been doing before her dinner with Antonin. It all seemed so far away now, and she shied away from asking him important questions about what he might have found.

She was certain that if he found anything at all, it was important that the public know what had been putrefying in the heart of Glory’s Temple, but on a personal level, she was momentarily exhausted. She’d gotten what she wanted, right? Antonin admitted what he’d done and he’d died a horrific death. Was that justice?

It all seemed too big, too heavy for her to handle just then. It was much easier to imagine what it must have been like for Silas to sneak her out of the cathedral, take her to Rasmus, then smuggle her out of the EVP, across the continent, and back to his home town in… Tennessee? She wasn’t entirely certain where the Smoky Mountains were, but that felt right.

Wherever they were, it made sense that he would look a bit haggard. Not even his mad spirit could come away from a marathon like that unaffected.

The soft, vulnerable part of her whose protective shell had been scoured away ached at the sight of his slightly rounded shoulders. Silas seemed just a bit more human now. Breakable.

And if her heart quickened at the thought of the source of that vulnerability being her, well… she didn’t have to think about that just then, either.

After taking a tentative bite, she surprised herself by asking, “Do you want some?”

She wasn’t entirely sure if Silas knew how monumental it was that her first impulse was to share her food with him, but she suspected he understood enough.

“No, baby,” he said, his tone gruff, “that’s for you. I put more in the drawer there, see? There’s also energy gel packs and some fruit leather in there. It’s not great, but that’s what I had in the cabinet. I’ll get you more from the market soon.”

It hit her like a fist. Petra clutched the protein bar to her chest and curled over instinctively until her forehead pressed against his bicep.

“Who are you?” she gasped.

Silas cupped the back of her head. His claws threaded through the damp hair there, holding tight, when he answered, “I’m yours.”