Page 54 of Vows of Silence

Just me.

A shaky breath escaped me before I could stop it, relief flooding through my body so intensely it almost hurt.

Thank God.

I pressed both hands against my face, trying to steady myself.

This was getting ridiculous now.

Dreams were one thing. People dreamed weird shit all the time. But this? My brain was beginning to blur Luca and Silas together in ways that genuinely unsettled me.

Luca had become my safety net. The person I willingly told all my secrets to. But day by day, piece by piece, Silas was replacing him. He forced my secrets through the cameras and monitoring. He inserted himself into the space I had reserved for Luca, and with no way to contact him—to remind myself he was real—there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I shoved the blanket off me and climbed out of bed, pacing the small room whilst trying to force my thoughts into some kind of order.

Was I losing my mind?

Maybe isolation was finally getting to me. Maybe my brain was desperately trying to merge the only two men who had ever paid attention to me into one person because it was easier than accepting reality.

Because reality was that Luca made me feel safe.

Silas absolutely fucking didn’t.

One listened to me talk for hours about my fears and my dreams, and my stupid little thoughts that nobody else cared enough to hear.

The other had kidnapped me.

Luca comforted me in ways nobody else ever had.

Silas terrified me in ways I didn’t fully understand yet. And yet…

I stopped pacing.

Luca had always taught me to pay attention.

To breathe through panic.

To listen instead of react.

To notice details.

And now I was starting to realise that everything Luca had ever taught me seemed perfectly designed for surviving Silas.

That’s why I was blending the two.

Because Luca was still here. My subconscious remembered him. Remembered what he had taught me. He never saved me. He always made me think for myself.

And that was all I needed to escape here.

Chapter 19

The Flame

By this point, I had read almost half the books Silas brought me.

At first, I’d ignored them entirely, leaving them stacked untouched in the corner out of sheer stubbornness. I didn’t want gifts from my kidnapper, didn’t want entertainment from him, and certainly didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing I appreciated any of it. But there were only so many hours I could spend staring at concrete walls before boredom won the battle. Now, reading had become part of the strange little routine forming around us.

With books I was able to escape—not just from this room, but also from my thoughts. The dreams of Silas and Luca were becoming much more frequent, and it was hard to distinguish imagination from reality.