Page 99 of Fractured Allegiance
I don’t tell him to sit.
He doesn’t ask.
We just stand there, suspended in the kind of pause that feels like it’s waiting to see who will blink first.
The burner phone is still in my hand, its weight unfamiliar. Heavy in a way that says it wasn’t meant to be passed between strangers. It’s a lifeline disguised as a trap, or maybe the other way around.
I set it down on the counter without looking at it again.
My eyes can’t peel themselves off of him. My mouth moves of its own accord, murmuring, “Do you even know what you’re doing?”
Silas doesn’t move. His throat works, once. “I thought I did.”
“And now?”
He looks around the room, like he’s measuring the exits, the angles, the ways to get out of this conversation.
He doesn’t find one.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I know I’m not supposed to care this much.”
My throat tightens. Not because I’m moved, but because I’m surprised, just a little, hearing it out loud.
“And yet you do.”
He nods.
I step forward. The distance between us may as well go up in vapors from the burgeoning heat. “So… what happens now?”
Silas exhales through his nose, steady but quiet. Not a sigh. A release.
“We lie,” he says.
“To who?”
“To everyone who isn’t standing in this room.”
I nod again.
Then I ask the question that’s been pressing at the inside of my ribs since the first time I saw his eyes under that rooftop haze.
“What do you see when you look at me?”
He doesn’t blink.
“I see the reason I haven’t pulled the trigger.”
My chest tightens.
I don’t know what he means.
And I do.
He’s still standing in the same place — but I can feel him closer. The energy between us is crawling now, hot and bare, like it doesn’t care what we call it anymore.
“I’m not afraid of Drazen,” I say.
“I know.”
