Chapter 6 THE WEIGHT OF KNOWING 2

Cael POV

My phone is still face down on the floor.

I haven't touched it in an hour.

Silas's words are still sitting behind my eyes like something burning. "I know you've been looking at Rowe. I know what you saw. Don't make the mistake of thinking that information belongs to you."

I pick up my notebook. Rowe's name is still at the top of the clean page. Just his name and the number underneath it.

83

Except it isn't 83 anymore. I looked at him in the kitchen tonight. Briefly. By accident.

It's 81 now.

Two days dropped in one evening. I have never seen a number drop that fast without a reason I could see. Without a hospital bed or a car crash or something I could point to and say, " There, that's why.

There is no reason I can see.

Which means the reason is something I don't know about yet.

I press my back against the bed, stare at the ceiling, and make myself think clearly. Because this is the part where most people would panic, and most people would run, and I cannot be most people right now.

Fact: Silas knows Rowe's number.

Fact: Silas did not get that information from me.

Fact: I have been the only person I know of who can read the numbers since the day the ability showed up when I was twelve and ruined everything.

So either Silas has another source, another person somewhere with the same thing I have, or Silas already knows how Rowe dies because Silas is the one who plans to make it happen.

I write both options down.

I stare at them.

The second one makes my hands go cold.

By 3 a.m., I have made exactly one decision. I am not leaving. I had an exit plan. Documents, money, and a contact. I had everything. I was two weeks away from being gone.

I am not leaving.

Not until I understand what Silas knows and how he knows it. Because if I disappear now, Rowe stays in this house alone with whatever is coming for him in 81 days, and no one can see it.

I am aware this is not a smart decision.

I write it down anyway.

Morning comes like it always does, rude and too bright. I hear Silas in the hallway before I hear anything else. His footsteps are easy to recognize, always even, always unhurried, like a man who has never once needed to rush because everything already goes the way he wants.

I fold my notebook under my mattress, get dressed, and go downstairs.

Silas is at the table. Britta is pouring coffee and talking about something small and normal, the weather, a neighbor, something. She looks happy. She always looks happy now, this careful, practiced happiness that I think she built herself just to survive, and every time I see it, I feel something twist in my chest because she does not know. She chose this man because she was tired and scared, and he was warm and steady, and she did not know what he built this family on top of.

Rowe comes in last. He doesn't look at me when he sits down.

But his knee, under the table, presses briefly against mine.

One second. Gone.

My brain short-circuits so completely that Britta has to say my name twice before I realize she asked me something.

At school, I cannot focus on anything. I sit in first period and stare at the board and replay the knee thing approximately nine hundred times. Which is insane. Which is completely insane given everything else that is happening, given the 81-day clock, given Silas's text, given the fact that I spent all night mapping out whether my stepbrother is on a murder timeline.

And yet.

His knee pressed against mine.

I write stop it on the corner of my notebook and underline it.

I mean the feelings. Not the notebook.

Delphine finds me at lunch. She takes one look at my face and says, "You look like you made a terrible decision and you're already committed to it."

"I'm staying," I say.

She sets her tray down. "Staying. As in, not leaving."

"Yes."

She is quiet for a moment. Then: "Because of the number."

"Partially."

She looks at me. Delphine has this way of looking at people where it feels like she can read the parts you didn't say out loud. I have always appreciated this about her. I currently wish she would stop.

"Cael," she says carefully. "How fast is it dropping?"

"Fast."

"How fast is fast?"

I tell her. Two days in one evening.

She puts her fork down. "That's not natural causes speed. That's"

"I know what it is," I say. My voice comes out very flat and very steady, which is the voice I use when something is scaring me and I cannot afford to show it.

She reaches across the table and puts her hand over my wrist, the one with the long sleeve, and doesn't say anything about that, just holds it for a second.

"Okay," she says. "We figure it out. What do we know?"

I am walking to my last class when it happens.

I turn the corner and nearly walk directly into Rowe. He catches my arm before I stumble. We are suddenly very close in the middle of an empty hallway, and his hand is on my arm, and I look up at him, and the 81 above his head pulses like it's breathing, and I hate this so much, I hate seeing it, I hate knowing it, and I can't tell him

"Hey." His voice is quiet. He drops my arm. "You didn't eat breakfast."

I stare at him. "What?"

"At the table. You didn't eat anything."

"I wasn't hungry."

He looks at me the way he did in my room last night. Like the question is the whole sentence,e and there's nothing behind it, no angle, no trade. Then he says, very low, "I'm going to figure out what he has on you."

I go still. "Rowe"

"Not asking permission." He steps back. "Just telling you."

He walks away.

I stand in the empty hallway with my heart doing something complicated and useless and look at the space where he just was.

Then my phone buzzes in my pocket.

I pull it out.

Unknown number. Silas. Same format as the last message.

I heard you two talking this morning. The hallway has good acoustics, doesn't it?

I read it once.

Then the second message comes.

He can't save you, Cael. And he can't save himself. Especially not from the person who already has the other half of what you can do.

I stop breathing.

The other half.

There is another person with this ability, and Silas has it, and I have been sitting in this house for three months not knowing, and the number dropped two days ago because someone is already using it against Rowe.

My phone buzzes one more time.

She says hello, by the way.

She.