Page 45 of Silent as Sin
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. My body locked, stiff and useless, as if one wrong step would shatter the air around me.
The paper birds I’d folded sat neatly on the table by the window. But these… these weren’t mine. They didn’t belong. They were a message.
Venom was dead. I knew that, but the shadow of him rose up out of those broken bodies, choking me. Someone had been inhere. Someone had crossed the line between outside and inside, between safe and hunted.
The blanket slid from my fingers, falling soundless to the floor. My lips parted, but no sound came out. My throat clamped shut, locked tight around the scream clawing to get free.
That’s how Ashen found me.
The door creaked open, his boots hitting the floor with steady weight. He stopped cold when he saw me.
“Wren?” His voice was rough, wary.
I couldn’t answer. My body wouldn’t let me.
He followed my gaze. Saw the birds.
For a beat, silence. Then his voice dropped, steel-hard and low, carrying enough fury to split the walls. “Motherfucker.”
The air shifted as he moved, crossing the room in long, heavy strides. His presence wrapped around me before his hands did, heat and leather and the dangerous calm of a man one second away from tearing the world apart.
“Don’t look at them.” His hand brushed my arm, careful, grounding. “Look at me.”
I tried. My eyes dragged up from the floor, slow and heavy, until I met his. His jaw was tight, eyes piercing enough to cut, but they locked on me like I was the only thing that mattered.
“You’re safe,” he said, quiet and certain. “I swear to you—you’re safe.”
But the bodies on the floor said otherwise.
And for the first time since the kiss, the truth slammed hard into me.
The danger wasn’t gone. It was inside these walls.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE SIGHT OFthose birds burned into my skull,tiny bodies crumpled on the floor, wings twisted wrong, feathers matted with dried blood. A message. A warning.
And they’d left it in her room.
Wren was stiff as stone, eyes hollow, skin pale. If I let her stand there another second, she’d shatter. I slid an arm around her waist, felt the tremor running through her, and muttered through clenched teeth, “Come on.” She didn’t fight me, didn’t even breathe, just let me haul her out into the hall and to myroom. I shoved the door open hard enough to rattle the frame. “In here.”
She walked like her legs barely worked, slow and shaky, until she dropped onto the edge of my bed. Jewel’s eyes caught mine at the end of the hall.
“Stay with her,” I snapped. My voice came out harder than I meant, but I didn’t give a damn. “Elara too. Don’t leave her alone.”
Jewel didn’t argue. Elara arrived a breath later, reading the tension in one look. They went inside without a word, settling near her as she sat stiff, the glass bird in her hand like a weak defense.
I shut the door and turned for the war room, fury burning so hot in my chest it felt like acid. Every muscle in me screamed to hunt the bastard who’d gotten inside, drag him out by the throat, and bleed him into the dirt.
Instead, I walked into the war room.
The door slammed against the wall. Warden was bent over the table with maps spread wide, Hex and Rex flanking him. Conversation cut off the second they saw me.
“We got a rat,” I said, my voice raw and certain. “No other explanation.”
Silence locked the room tight.
Warden straightened slow, eyes narrowing. “What happened?”
