Page 2 of The Villains We Make

He’s here again, the face hovering over me, those turquoise eyes. I try to breathe, but my chest heaves with so much emotion that it feels like I’m swallowing water, choking on it.

Silas.

Silas making love to me.

Silas holding me.

Silas kissing me before he betrays me.

Fire and ash and Silas’s betrayal.

“Shh. You’re safe.”

I need to move, to wake up, but my arms and legs won’t work. When I open my eyes, I see faces like shadows. Like looking through dirty glass again. Strangers. A woman. A man. And then Silas.

His eyes are so much like Sly’s. Like ice.

I’m freezing. It is so cold, and I’m freezing. It’s Ethan’s needle. It’s what he gave me that has me trapped.

“She should have woken up by now,” I hear Silas say. “She hit her head… The accident… She hit her head too hard. Is that?—”

The woman speaks in a lowered voice. I pick up one word. Drugged.

Drugged.

Yes.

Ethan injected me with something when I tried to get out of the car. He’d been giving me something for days. He said it was to help me sleep. He said it was for the pain, but it wasn’t that.

Ethan betrayed me too.

Silas and Ethan and Sly, and even my own father.

Is there no one I can trust?

“Give her something then!” Silas demands, and I feel a tiny prick in my arm.

I drift away, into my childhood home, my bedroom, the small bay window I love. It’s quiet as I sit alone in the warm light and read, but a commotion outside has me turn as a dark cloud obscures the sun. I look out through my binoculars into the garden of the house next door and watch two boys and a girl. I’m the girl. I’m twelve, and Ethan is fourteen, and Silas? He’s already a man. Silas looks up at me in the window. His hair flops into his eyes and we watch each other for a long, long time. What had he said to me that day?

Some things are better left unknown.

He was right.

Warm tears run down my cheeks. Someone wipes them away.

“Shh, sweet girl. Sleep. It’s all right.”

But it’s not all right. Nothing is all right, nor will it ever be all right again. My house is gone. My father is in prison—my father, who has been lying to me all my life. Ethan—well, Ethan and Mr. and Mrs. Fox—I never knew any of them. When I see them now, when their faces swim in my vision, their expressions are dark, their teeth sharp, their eyes as red as the rubies in that ring Sly likes to wear on his little finger.

But it’s not them who have tears running down my cheeks when I can’t move my limbs. When I can’t properly open my eyes.

It’s not the thought of all I’ve lost, all I never had.

It’s Silas. It’s Silas’s betrayal that makes my heart ache. Silas’s lies. His manipulations. What we did, what we shared. If we’d had one more moment, I’d have told him the truth. Told him I loved him. Told him I had always loved him.

What a fool I am.

My thoughts come in the form of chaotic, dizzying images as I lie here trying to make sense of all the people and events that have shaped my life up until this day, this moment, the things that led me into that car with Ethan and Chandler.

---