Page 100 of The Silent War

“Yeah,” he said softly, moving foot to foot. “I’m watching her now. She curls her fingers when she dreams. Didn’t know that. Cute, isn’t it? She’ll stop fighting once she understands who leads.” A pause I wanted to fill with a gunshot. “Training takes time.”

My mouth went dry. The word landed wrong. He liked it. He liked the way it felt when he tried to fit it around her—training, disobedient, wife. He was building an entire lexicon in the dark, believing language alone could make her his. Men always think words are enough until they meet a Crow.

I listened to her inhale again. Counted to three. Listened to the exhale. Counted to three. She’s safe, I told myself. She’s sleeping. He’s just talking. He hasn’t touched. If he had touched, her breath would have changed. I know what her body sounds like when she’s uncomfortable in sleep. I know the swallow hitch, the reflex of a hand clutching the sheet. None of those were there. She was peaceful. The only reason she was peaceful was because she didn’t know he was there.

My throat burned. Because the only reasonhewas there was because I wasn’t. We weren’t there.

I closed my eyes, and my head did the thing it always does when something threatens to unmake me: it went to systems. To solutions. To pre-empt the next ten disasters before the first one finished happening.

Her breath. Again.

Bastion shifted, a low sound at the back of his throat. He curled closer without waking, palm flattening at my arm like he was checking I was still there. He does that when he’s too tired to move properly. He reaches. It’s a reflex older than most of our scars. I’m not sentimental. I am very good at remembering.

The phone warmed against my cheek. Alaric kept talking. Filling the space with himself.

“She won’t tell me where she went last night,” his ego sounded bruised by a girl asleep in another room. “Looked through me when I asked. She’ll learn.”

He loved that phrase. She’ll learn. He believed in a future where she was smaller, because he mistook quiet for weakness. The dynasty trains girls to be calm while they bleed. We were trained to hear that calm and know where the wound is.

I put his voice on one side of a scale and her breath on the other. His side weighed nothing.

There were a dozen ways to end this quickly. Walk into his world and tear his throat out in front of the men he uses to feel tall. Leak a rumor to the wrong house and watch him get eaten by politics sharp enough to make him cry for a mother he doesn’t deserve.

Pull him into a casino conversation and let numbers show him why confidence is a currency and he can’t afford ours.

Lure him into a back hallway and say I’m going to speaknow and that means you’re going to listen and then make the listening permanent.

Quick would cost her. Quick would look like the thing everyone fears when they say Crow with their lips tight. She isn’t a rumor. She’s sacred. You don’t spill the sacred in public.

So we wouldn’t.

We’d make this clean.

We’d make him useless.

We’d cut every place where he could stand between her and the door and call that protection.

We’d make him late until late felt like humiliation. We’d surround him with smiling men who answered to us and watch his jokes die in empty rooms. We’d let him realize he had no routes left. And when he left—because men like that always leave when they can’t perform power—we’d make sure he believed it was his idea and that leaving her was his proof of love. He’d tell someone later that he stepped back for her own good and they’d nod and clap his shoulder and we’d smile in the dark.

The animal in my chest, the one that was trained to be a crow, didn’t want clean. It wanted immediate. It wanted to break the bone in his wrist that held the door-frame and then use that hand to make him open every door he’d ever closed around her. It wanted to kneel at her bedside and saywe’re here, angel, sleep,while the floorboards dried where we’d dragged him out.

Her breath stopped me. Every time.

She doesn’t need to wake to blood. She needs quiet. She needs to open her eyes and see light she likes. She needs water she will actually drink without me having to coax it between her lips with a thumb at her chin. She needs to know that if she says no to dinner, no one calls her disobedient like a manwho’s never been told no by anyone who could make it matter.

Bastion murmured again, a broken sound like the ones he makes when the memory of cages creeps in too close. I turned slightly and pressed my palm to his arm. He settled.

“Week after week,” Alaric was saying, lower now, as if he’d walked further into the hall and turned his mouth away. “Promises don’t move her. That’s the problem with girls like this—too many handlers and they think no one leads. She’ll figure out I’m different. She will.”

You’re not different. You’re ordinary. Crows kill ordinary.

I let the thought pass. I catalogued his confidence. I pinned each phrase to the board in my head and drew strings between them the way I do with ports and manifests and missing crates.With her now.Weeks.Dinner.Cocaine.Disobedient.Wife.She’ll learn.

He wanted a pet. He wanted her to be an object he could point at and saysee? Look how good I am at owning.That was the punchline. He wanted a mirror.

We don’t want a mirror. We want a woman. A mind. A mouth. A spine that pushes back when the world tries to bend her. We built a city so she could be the version of herself the world wouldn’t let her be without fear. We didn’t bring her to an altar to shrink her. We built the altar to hold her weight.

Her breath changed—barely. A deeper exhale, a longer inhale, the kind that comes before the body turns over if it’s free to. I listened with everything I had. If his feet moved closer, I would hear it. If she woke, the first word in her throat would be our names even if she didn’t say them out loud.