Page 21 of The Scars of War (Of Ruin and Fire #1)

The Devil You Know

Riven doesn’t speak on the way back, he doesn’t need to.

The silence does all the work. We move through the vault like ghosts, like the place already forgot we were there.

The walls don’t groan. The gold veins don’t pulse.

The air feels scraped clean, as if whatever had been watching me finally turned away.

The damage is done. Something cracked, and we both felt it. And now?

Now we’re pretending nothing has changed.

The elevator ride to the surface feels longer than it should. The hum beneath our feet is wrong, unsteady, like the whole mechanism is tired of holding secrets. I stand beside him, close enough to feel the heat off his body, but he doesn’t reach for me. Not this time.

Outside, the city lights are blinding. Everything is too bright. Too fast. The neon signs blur into sharp streaks of red and white across the windshield, and I realize how quiet it is, not because the world stopped, but because we did.

He drives with both hands on the wheel, shoulders locked, jaw clenched. No music. No words. Just the rhythmic slap of tires against wet pavement, and the low throb of something that used to feel like tension but now feels like distance.

I watch his knuckles as they flex. Watch the way his mouth stays a tight line. I want to ask what he saw in me. I want to ask if it scared him.

I don’t, because I already know the answer.

When we pull into the mansion, he kills the engine and stares through the windshield like he’s waiting for something to end. Then he gets out, opens my door, and steps back. No eye contact. No lingering brush of fingers. Just a motion. A gesture. One that says go inside . So I do.

The house is quiet. Not in the way it usually is, elegant and still, pulsing with quiet menace. This silence is different. Hollow. Like the bones beneath the marble have gone soft. The walls feel taller. The ceilings are too high. Every shadow feels like it’s waiting for me to flinch .

We pass the hall of war trophies. I glance toward the crown’s case…it’s open. The glass is lifted. The crown is missing. Riven doesn’t look. He keeps walking like he doesn’t notice. Like if he acknowledges it, something worse will follow us upstairs.

He doesn’t speak when we reach the bedroom. Just stops in the doorway, like the threshold might burn him if he crosses it. His eyes land on the bed, on me, and then shift away. “Get some rest,” he says, tiredly. Then he turns and leaves.

No argument. No kiss. No claim.

I sit on the edge of the mattress for a long time before I crawl beneath the sheets.

I don’t take off my clothes. I don’t check the bruises.

I don’t cry. I just lie there, awake, while the scent of him fades and the room settles into a silence that feels less like sleep, and more like being buried alive.

I leave the mansion at sunrise. I don’t say goodbye. I don’t look back. There’s no one to see me off anyway. The front door clicks shut behind me like it’s grateful I’m gone .

The walk to the train station is quiet, but it’s not peaceful. The air feels off. Like the wind’s holding its breath. Like the streetlamps are watching me from behind their bulbs. I pull my coat tighter, though I don’t remember putting it on. And I keep moving.

The subway is almost empty, the way it always is just before the morning rush hits.

The platform feels crowded. Thick with heat and eyes.

A man across the tracks watches me for too long.

His hands tremble. A woman beside me clutches her purse tighter, whispering something to herself I can’t quite hear.

When the train comes, I step on like nothing’s wrong. Every window catches my reflection just a little too late. Like the world’s trying to keep up with what I’ve become.

I sit in the back. Hood up. Legs crossed.

Hands still. Trying not to breathe too loud.

Trying not to notice the boy in the next seat tracing symbols into the fogged-up glass.

One of them looks familiar, but I'm not sure. The other makes something in my blood throb like it’s answering a question I don’t remember being asked.

I shift away. He stares at me with eyes that look too old for his face and says nothing. Neither do I.

At my stop, I step onto the platform and nearly trip over a woman crouched at the edge of the stairs. She looks up at me and grins wide, too wide, her teeth blackened like they’ve rotted from the inside. “Found you,” she sings.

I freeze.

She giggles and scampers past me like a feral animal, muttering to herself in a language that seems wrong just hearing it. No one else reacts. No one looks. The crowd just moves around her like she doesn’t exist. But I feel it.

The weight of her attention. The way her grin follows me even after she’s gone.

Outside the station, the streets are colder.

Harder. Louder. The noise doesn’t sound real.

Car horns echo too long. Footsteps land too heavy.

Conversations start behind me and end before I can hear the words, like the city is mimicking itself.

Like it’s trying to stay normal while something beneath it comes undone.

I pull my hood tighter. Keep my head down. But I can feel them. Not just the people. The others.

The ones who turn just a beat too late. The ones who flinch at my shadow like they know it’s not mine anymore.

A man walks past me in a navy suit with threadbare cuffs and shoes that don’t look like they belong to him.

His shoulders are too straight. His movements too smooth.

Like he studied what walking should look like and still hasn’t gotten it right.

He tips his hat as he passes. Polite. Mechanical. I don’t even see his eyes, just the mirrored lenses of his sunglasses. And in them, for half a second, I catch my reflection.

Only it doesn’t blink, even when I do. Even when I stop walking and stare, it just watches me. Smiling.

I don’t follow him. I don’t scream. I just walk faster.

Every window I pass reflects me at the wrong angle. A frame behind. A few inches off. Like I’m being remembered wrong by the glass.

A woman across the street drops her groceries when I look at her. A child clutches his mother and whispers, “That’s her.” The mother doesn’t ask what he means. She just walks faster too.

By the time I make it back to my building, my hands are shaking. My keys are in my palm, but I don’t remember pulling them out. I slide one into the lock .

The door unlatches before I turn it. And the apartment…

isn’t right. The lights are off. The air is still, not calm.

Still like something waiting. I step inside, slowly.

My boots echo on the hardwood even though I’m not moving loudly.

The shadows feel thicker than usual. Stretching from the corners like they’re trying to touch me.

My reflection in the blacked-out TV screen watches me take every step.

The silence is deliberate.

Like something just out of sight is watching to see how I break.

I don’t plan to break, and apparently, the silence in my apartment doesn’t either. It settles, thick, aware, and intentional.

Something has changed since I left, and not just the air or light.

The very walls feel different, thinner, maybe.

Closer. Every corner feels sharper, like it might cut if I get too close.

The fridge hums with an anxious kind of rhythm.

The overhead light in the kitchen flickers as I pass it, though no switch was flipped.

The floor creaks beneath my heel, the same spot that always does, but now the sound is hollow. A warning instead of an annoyance .

I move through the room slowly. The air feels like it’s waiting for something. For me. I leave the door unlocked. Whatever this is, whatever has changed, I want it to come in.

I don’t run. I don’t even turn on the lights. I just wait.

And when it comes, it doesn’t come with a band.

It comes like a tide. The temperature doesn’t drop in a flash, it’s slow and quiet, like water rising in a locked room.

The heat from my body pulls away from my skin.

My fingertips go numb as the warmth in my skin fades like it was never mine to begin with.

Then the hall light dies. Not with a pop or a buzz. It just exhales and goes dark.

And I feel it, a shift that isn’t a presence or a movement.

It’s the kind of shift that unmoors gravity.

The kind that presses down on the world from an angle that shouldn’t exist. Something has entered the space between things, between seconds, between breaths, between the reality of the room itself.

I turn toward the feeling.

And he’s there.

There was no door opened. No footsteps. No warning .

He is just present, standing at the center of my living room like he was already part of it. Like the world has been edited around him.

He’s tall. Composed. Unreasonably gorgeous in the way only something eternal can be, like he was sculpted by grief and refined by time. Black coat tailored within an inch of sin. Every line of him deliberate. Still, but not stiff. A man built to be worshipped, feared, wanted.

His skin is pale, but not bloodless, more like moonlight caught in flesh. Just… perfect. Smooth and striking and impossible to ignore.

And his eyes…his eyes are what mourning would look like if it seduced you instead of burying you. Soft gray. Piercing. Steady.

He says nothing. Doesn’t move. I’m forgetting how to breathe.

He watches me like he’s done it before. As if he’s been cataloging every version of me long before I ever bled into this moment.