Page 194 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Silas jerks against my hold.
The movement nearly pulls me off balance. I catch his arm with both hands now, bracing myself against him. Fear is climbing fast, but something colder is beginning to take shape beneath it.
This feels wrong.
Not just cruel.
Staged.
The empty lot. The timing. The way Kadin keeps speaking as if the point is not simply to provoke, but to draw Silas farther from the version of himself that can still stop.
“Silas,” I say, and this time the terror in my voice is obvious.
Kadin hears that too.
His eyes sharpen. Then his gaze moves over me in a way that makes my skin crawl.
“I figured,” he says, looking back at Silas, “I’d let you have your turn with her first. Girls like Octavia always remember what they’re actually good for.”
The sentence is so vile it seems to split the air.
Silas does not need time to process it.
He moves.
Not a thought. Not a choice. Movement. Pure, immediate violence breaking loose from the body I’ve been trying to hold together with my hands. My grip tears loose. The knife flashes again near his thigh. My heart slams against my ribs so hard it hurts.
That is when the feeling in my gut becomes certainty.
Kadin is baiting him.
Not impulsively. Not because he cannot help himself. Deliberately. Every word. Every look. Every second spent in this empty lot. He wanted Silas furious enough to chase. Wanted him armed. Wanted him in motion.
This is not just a fight.
It is a trap.
I move before I can think.
Silas is already breaking away from me, every line of him aimed at Kadin with that terrifying, immediate certainty I have only ever seen when rage has finished becoming purpose. My whole body launches after him on instinct, panic and fury collapsing into one violent need to get between them before whatever Kadin wants from this actually happens.
Then I see Kadin’s face.
Not the smugness. Not the taunting little smile.
His eyes.
They slide past Silas, over his shoulder, toward something in the dark behind him. The expression there is not surprise. It is anticipation.
A scream rises in me so fast it feels like it claws straight up from my stomach. It never gets the chance to fully leave.
A shape tears free from the shadows at the edge of the lot.
The man moves with brutal, awful certainty. No stumble. No hesitation. A metal pipe arcs through the weak parking lot light and crashes into the side of Silas’s head with a sound that seems to split the night in half. The force of it snaps him sideways. His body folds hard, faster than my mind can process, the knife spinning from his hand and skidding uselessly across the pavement.
Silas hits the ground.
For one impossible second, the world becomes that sight and nothing else.
