Page 44 of At the Mercy of Midnight
His feet slammed into solid ground, and he groaned with discomfort as a body pressed flush against him, accompanied by a startled, feminine sound.
Silas’ arms instinctually wrapped around her, but the sudden shift from lying down asleep to standing awake in the middle of a dark hall, had him lurching, feet stumbling.
Disoriented, they started to fall. He twisted mid-air, afraid to land on her, but they careened into the wall instead. His head struck the wood painfully before landing flat on his back, holding Amelia to his chest.
“Fuck,” he groaned, head throbbing.
Amelia uttered a low moan of discomfort, her breath warm against his collarbone. She pushed herself up, two hands sitting flat against his chest. Squinting in the darkness, he could only just see her. Her hair was loose again, falling around her like a curtain and obscuring her face.
“You…” she breathed out unevenly, “…were supposed to come find me before it happened.”
Silas sighed deeply. “I fell asleep, I’m sorry.”
“It’s alright, so did I,” she groaned. “Thatsucked.”
He was about to agree, but his body froze instead, awareness skittering over him.
Amelia’s legs sat snugly on either side of his hips, an intimate position that Silas could never have imagined would occur with her. An intense warmth sat between them.
He couldn’t see her clothing, but his hands were gripping at her hips, thumbs pressing into the delicate flare of her hip bone, and his forearms…they brushed against the unmistakable soft warmth of bare thigh.
She shifted against him, and Silas pressed his eyes closed, holding in his groan. He hurriedly lifted her and rolled, depositing her on the cold flooring beside him.
Silas sat, rubbing a hand over his face with a deep breath.
After a beat of silence, he faced her. She hugged her knees to her chest, chin resting atop them, eyes on him. Vision adjusting to the dark, he could see she was, in fact, not wearing pants at all as he’d feared. He had never seen her bare legs before, and he felt unworthy of seeing them now.
“You alright?” he asked softly, forcing his gaze away from the slope of her calf muscle.
She bobbed her head on top of her knee.
Silence fell again, their eyes on each other in the dim light. It felt like something passed between them, his heart still racing. In that moment, Silas considered offering up his entire wealth to know what was running through her brain, but it was in his scrutiny that he noticed she had begun to shiver.
He stood and offered to help her up.
Silas watched with fascination as she eyed his hand, as though debating whether to accept it. She reached out, and hefelt a moment of triumph, like he’d won some valuable prize as he gripped at her fingers and pulled her to stand.
He let her go and they shifted towards their own rooms.
“I don’t care what mother says,” he said, “we’ll find the answers. They’ll be in this house somewhere.” Amelia nodded, keeping uncharacteristically quiet. “I have a lab in the city, too, so we can start our experiments tomorrow.”
“Okay,” she agreed quietly, arms hugging around her middle.
He swallowed, hating how small and vulnerable she looked. Silas was used to her grandiose personality, her fierce intelligence and willingness to display that before him.
“Okay,” he said.
They held eyes for a lingering moment, before shutting themselves away in their rooms.
THIRTEEN
Silas’s laboratory sat in the heart of the city; a building purchased as a means to escape his home. It was half library, half workshop, with the controlled chaos of a scholar who worked relentlessly, while still valuing precision.
The walls were lined with towering bookshelves, the dark oak groaning under the weight of leather-bound tomes, aged scrolls and academic journals that were filled Silas’ meticulous handwriting. Loose papers were stuffed between the pages and stacked into untidy piles, other large books glowed with arcane symbols, an indication that it was locked to anyone but him.
His worktable dominated the middle of the room, its surface a battlefield of open books, empty vials, and partiallydismantled magical items. Tuned instruments sat underneath glass spheres, giving off a faint humming that set the room abuzz with a constant low-level noise. Broken Waystone chips sat around from a past research project, their faded runes occasionally catching the light of his golden arcane lamps.
Amelia took it in with a quiet, stunned expression. She paused beside a section of his worktable, scanning across a series of parchment covered in the ancient rune sequences from the South Monolith, which Silas had last been working on. It had become his life’s work to decipher the nature of the Monoliths, how they worked, how the magic could be tamed, stabilised.
