Page 169 of Crave
That choice—at the time, it had felt tactical. Clean.
But now?
Now it felt too clean. Too easy. Too fucking neat.
Like someone had offered us an escape route just so we’d take the bait.
My stomach twisted.
I glanced down, watching my blood drip to the pavement. The staples in my side were tugging apart. I could feel the warmth spreading again, soaking through the makeshift dressing.
“Silas!” Theo’s voice cracked through the silence. “You need to sit down, brother. You look like hell.”
I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Every part of me was hyper-focused—ears pricked for a sound, a movement, anything to explain what we’d missed.
Think.
THINK.
This wasn’t just an attack.
This was the beginning of something else.
Something worse.
The world tilted sideways.
The concrete beneath my boots blurred for a moment—just a second—but it was enough. Enough to send a ripple of something cold through my gut.
I staggered back from the body, blood soaking into the gravel, my breath shallow and burning. My hand brushed my side—sticky warmth already leaking again through the staples. But that wasn’t what stopped me.
It was the weight in my pocket. Something I didn’t remember putting there.
My fingers closed around it—paper. Brittle. Torn.
And then I wasn’t in the warehouse anymore.
I was thirteen again.
Back in the study.
Back in that goddamn room with the smell of cigar smoke and whiskey.
Back in the place where my father shoved me against the wall and spat the words never say that name again with a kind of terror I didn’t understand.
Not then.
But I did now.
My hand trembled as I pulled the scrap free. It was stained at the corner, the ink faded but still legible.
“Silas?”
I barely heard Theo behind me, boots crunching as he crossed the warehouse floor. My throat was dry. My chest hollow.
“What is that?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I just stared at it—those same four words.
