Page 99 of The Oath We Give

You asked for this.

You love me. Say you love me.

You want to stay here with me forever, right?

You’re fortunate you have money, girl. It’s awful for the ones that don’t.

It could’ve been worse, ya know?

You’re one of the lucky ones.

Stephen’s words and the cruel barrage of accusations from everyone around me echo in my ears, a thousand little hammers pounding away at my mind. I’m so close to exploding with a rage that could consume the world, so close to ripping apart the earth with my teeth.

But then something miraculous happens.

Silas’s fingers push a piece of hair behind my ear, palm lingering on my cheek, soaking up the tears that I had been desperately trying to contain. I look up slowly at him, eyebrows furrowed. He stares down at me before his lips turn up in a soft smile.

For the very first time since I’ve known the name Silas Hawthorne, he smiles.

An actual fucking smile. It’s sad, heartbreaking, and unmistakably genuine. As if he knew in this moment, I needed something warm, something kind more than anything else.

He is looking at me, the mess that I am, like I’m someone worth smiling at. It’s a gift that he gives to very, very few people. A gift that silently tells me I’m worthy of his kind of grace, of his kindness.

“No, Hex,” he whispers, shaking his head. “You did what you had to do so you could stay alive. That never made you weak. It never meant you asked for it. It makes you a survivor.”

A sob escapes my throat.

I’m scared.

Scared of what I’ll do to the people I care about. Innocent lives are destroyed by damaged people who were hurt before they had a chance to heal. I’m the example in this art of destruction.

I went through something horrific, I lived, and everyone told me I was lucky.

But no one showed me how to live with it. With this weight, this pain, these memories.

“You’re still living in survival mode. You just have to learn to turn it off, baby.”

Book made for [email protected]

TWENTY-THREE

A DARK SIDE

SILAS

There isnothing but silence in the dark of my home office, offering my mind a chance to settle. Smoke from my cigar swirls into the air, a bourbon in my hand as I lean back into my chair.

I peer at the gun resting on the wood in front of me, the black metal glistening in the moonlight streaming in from the window behind me.

An hour ago, that was what I used to kill someone.

I can still smell the gunpowder and blood singeing the air, hear the sound a bullet makes when it pierces through a skull and passes through brain matter.

The person that had been able to console a shattered Coraline days ago does not exist in this room. Not tonight.

My fingers tighten around my glass, lifting it to my lips for a long and slow pull of whiskey.

Charlie Monroe flunked out of tech school in the late nineties. He is—well, was—employed by a nearby computer repair store. With a wife and one son at home, Charlie was a naive victim of circumstance who was offered money in exchange for both his hacking and apparently vandalizing services.

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