CHAPTER 7

THE SILENCE

The drive back gives Salvatore too much time to think.

His hand finds the door handle before they've even reached the gates. He stops himself. Sits back.

Not yet.

If he walks in there tonight and pulls that bolt back, what does it teach Elian? That every rule bends the moment he cries loud enough. He kept Salvatore waiting at that table. Refused to wear what was sent for him. Made him look weak in front of his own staff. Salvatore built this house on one rule: nobody tests him twice. He isn't undoing twenty years over one crying fit.

Let him sit with it.

The car pulls up. Salvatore steps out, already shrugging off his jacket. The house is quiet the way it always is at this hour. Tonight it sits wrong.

A staff member meets him in the entry hall.

"Has he finally kept quiet?" He doesn't slow down.

"He has, sir." A pause. "Rather suddenly, actually."

Salvatore stops on the stairs. "Suddenly."

"He was still calling out an hour ago. Then nothing." She hesitates. "I didn't think it was my place to check on him."

"It wasn't." He says it on instinct, already climbing, already turning the words over.

He tells himself it's nothing. People cry themselves out. Silence doesn't mean anything happened.

He goes to his room like he told himself he would. Tie loose, jacket over the chair, shirt half undone. He tells himself he's not thinking about it.

He's thinking about it.

Please, someone, please.

The sound is still lodged somewhere behind his ribs. Now there's nothing behind it. No fists on wood. No voice. Just quiet, and Salvatore knows better than most men what sudden quiet after that much noise usually means.

He stands there, shirt half open, staring at nothing.

Probably nothing.

His hand stills on the last button. He thinks about how dark that room is. How long it's actually been, longer than he meant. Long enough for a frightened man to do something stupid in the dark, alone with it.

He's already reaching for his jacket again before he lets himself admit why.

Salvatore doesn't bother with the rest of the buttons. He grabs his jacket off the chair, shrugs it on over a half open shirt, and he's already moving before he's finished deciding whether moving is even the right thing to do.

It's nothing, he tells himself again, taking the stairs two at a time. He's checking on him because that's the responsible thing to do, because a man who owes a debt is worth more to him alive and functioning than sick or hurt from a night in the dark, because that's all this is, practicality, nothing more.

He almost believes it by the time he reaches the door.

He stops there, one hand on the iron bolt, and doesn't pull it back right away. He stands in the hallway a long moment instead, listening. Nothing comes from the other side. No fists against wood, no voice, no sound of any kind, and the quiet presses in on him worse now that he's standing right up against it than it did from two floors away.

What is he even doing in there, Salvatore wonders, and hates that some small, unwanted part of him is picturing an answer he doesn't like. Sleeping, maybe. Curled up somewhere in a corner, exhausted from hours of screaming, worn down into whatever thin, uneasy rest a person manages to find in a room like that. That would explain it. That would be fine.

He slides the bolt back slowly, careful not to let it scrape too loud, though he couldn't say why quiet matters to him right now.

The door swings open onto darkness that swallows the hall light almost whole. Salvatore steps in anyway, one hand braced against the frame, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

"Elian." He says it low, testing the air.

Nothing answers him.

He says it again, and this time there's an edge underneath it he doesn't bother hiding, not that there's anyone left to hide it from. "Elian."

Still nothing.

His eyes are pulling shapes out of the dark now, slow and reluctant, the wall, the corner of a shelf, and then, low against the floor near the door itself, a shape that isn't moving at all.

Something drops through Salvatore's chest, fast and cold.

He crosses the room in three strides, all the careful unhurried control he walked in with gone completely, and drops to a crouch beside the shape crumpled at the base of the door. Elian. Curled small on the cold floor, knees drawn up, one arm flung out at an angle that looks wrong, his face turned away, and he isn't making a single sound. Not the ragged breathing Salvatore had half braced himself to hear on the way down. Nothing at all.

"Elian." His voice comes out rougher than he intends. He doesn't wait for a response this time. He reaches out, fingers hovering just above Elian's shoulder for one suspended second, some part of him genuinely afraid of what touching him is going to confirm.

He isn't sure, at that moment, whether he's about to shake him awake or check whether there's still something to wake.

His hand lowers anyway, fingers grazing Elian's shoulder, meaning to feel for the rise and fall of breath, meaning to find a pulse, he isn't entirely sure which thought gets there first.

Elian's hand closes around his wrist.

Salvatore goes utterly still.

"You finally came." The words come out barely above a whisper, cracked down to almost nothing, so faint Salvatore has to lean in close just to catch them at all. Elian's eyes are barely open, glassy, unfocused, fixed somewhere near Salvatore's face without actually finding it. "You finally came."

"Elian." Something twists hard in Salvatore's chest, sharp enough that it startles him more than the words did. "Elian, look at me. Stay with me."

The grip around his wrist doesn't hold. It loosens, slow, and then all at once, Elian's hand sliding free and dropping to the floor, his eyes falling shut, his whole body going slack against the boards, and for one long, terrible second Salvatore doesn't move at all. Doesn't breathe. Just stares down at a man gone completely, frighteningly still beneath his hands.

"Elian." Sharper now, no softness left in it. Both hands close around Elian's shoulders. "Elian. Open your eyes. Now."

Nothing.

Salvatore's hand moves to the side of Elian's throat, fingers pressing in, searching, and when he finds it, a pulse, faint, too fast, but there, the relief that floods through him is so complete it nearly knocks something loose in his chest all over again.

He doesn't waste another second sitting with it. He gathers Elian up off the cold floor, one arm sliding beneath his knees, the other bracing his back, and Elian's head falls against his shoulder, weightless, utterly limp in a way that turns something cold in Salvatore all over again.

"Get this door open." His voice cuts down the hallway before he's even fully out of the room, loud enough to carry through the whole wing of the house. "Now. And get Doctor Ferrara on the phone. Tell him I need him here immediately, no delays."

Staff appear fast, startled into motion by the sound of him, doors opening, footsteps hurrying from every direction, and Salvatore doesn't slow for any of it. He carries Elian down the corridor with long, fast strides, Elian's hand loose and still against his chest, and the whole way there, over and over, he can't stop hearing it.

You finally came.