Silent Vows Jill Ramsower Novels & Stories

I had left the window unlocked on purpose. The soft scrape of the screen being lifted made my heart slam against my ribs. A moment later the curtain shifted, and Silas climbed through the open window with the same controlled silence he used for everything dangerous. Moonlight spilled across his shoulders as he straightened inside my room, barefoot, wearing only dark sweatpants. He closed the window behind him without a sound. We stared at each other in the silver light. He crossed the room in three quiet steps and stopped at the edge of my bed. I sat up slowly. Neither of us spoke. We both knew the rules of nights like this. Mom’s door was only twenty feet down the hall. One loud sound and e

I watched the last of it try to live in his chin and fail. He stopped where the floor told him. I let the silence work. Silence is a kind of weather. Slava’s pulse beside me was glacial and clean. Through the bond I felt her looking at the top of his bowed head the way a woman looks at a door she already survived. No shake in her. The shake was in me, black script under the collar writing a fast ugly clause I would show her later. The priestess’s hymnless quiet bothered me more than the beggar. Witch sight peeled at my seams. I tightened the old Slavic in the floor until her peel slipped. She almost smiled at the stone. I filed that.

I want my life to be clear. The kettle on the stove starts to whistle. It is a high, thin sound. I don't move to stop it. I just stand there in the middle of my room. I am Amara Rose Kline. I have a job. I have a company. I have a voice. But as I look at the box of shredded lies, I feel the old silence trying to come back. It is a different kind of silence this time. It is the silence of someone who doesn't know who to trust. It is the silence of a woman who is still waiting for the truth to be enough.

On the red room screen, Mira had fallen asleep sitting up for three seconds, chin on the blue socks, before jerking awake with panic in her face. "Still here," Silas told her. "I know." "You were sleeping." "I blinked long." "Bad lie." "Shut up." He did. Awkwardly. Like silence was a tool he had forgotten how to hold. I turned my wrist toward the debt key. "Kael." "Here." His voice was so thin. The word came with static and a wet edge he tried to hide. I could picture him somewhere beyond the nursery feed, strapped into whatever remained of Battery K-01, jaw locked, throat raw from the scream he had cut short. I did not let the picture soften me too far.

On the second morning, he met Silas Draven. Emeric's head of security was built like someone who had been constructed for a specific purpose and had never deviated from it. Broad shoulders, close-cropped hair, and eyes that moved across a room the way searchlights move across a prison yard. He intercepted Tobin in the hallway outside the guest wing with a smile that contained approximately the same amount of warmth as a surgical blade. "You're the collateral," Silas said, and the word landed like a label being pressed onto a jar.

He was a wall of solid muscle and expensive wool. "Step back, Mr. Voss," Silas said. The calm in his voice was more terrifying than Ryan’s shouting. "Get out of my way! That is my wife! Elara, tell this gorilla to move!" Ryan tried to shove past Silas, but it was like trying to move a mountain. Silas didn't even stagger. He simply placed a hand on Ryan’s chest and applied enough pressure to force the air out of his lungs. Elara reached the bottom of the air stairs. She turned slowly. The wind caught her hair, pulling it back from her face to reveal the cold, sharp lines of a woman Ryan didn't recognize. The diamond studs in her ears caught the runway lights, flashing like warning beacons.

I had selfishly chosen myself over the innocent child. "Kerry?" "Hm?" My eyes pried open. I had given up on pretending to be asleep after the first two hours. Silas had simply stated, in an unimpressed voice, how he could hear my heart beating faster; he knew when I was awake or not. Even if he didn't have his enhanced hearing, I'm sure he would be able to tell I wasn't asleep by how tense I was. The room was dark enough that I couldn't make out anything. Usually, such darkness, coupled with my anxiety, would have been unbearable, but the feel of Silas's chest against my back helped ease my nerves.

“We’re breaking the stasis! We're reclaiming the pulse!” ​I didn’t reach for the silver fire in my veins. Instead, I reached for the “Sovereign’s Silence”—the deep, rhythmic stillness I had practiced during my clinical rotations when monitoring patients in deep, vegetative comas. I pushed my consciousness into the ice, feeling for the rhythmic, slow-motion heartbeats of the prisoners. One beat every hour. A tiny, flickering spark in a sea of absolute zero.

Eve's nails dug into his shoulders, her whole body trembling with the effort of staying quiet. "You're doing so well," Silas whispered directly in her ear, too quiet for the microphone to pick up. "Being so good for us. Staying so quiet while I fill you."

There was an open seat—right between him and Olivia. Nathan stiffened. Olivia and Kayden? Same. I strolled over. "Let me introduce her," William said, voice calm but sharp enough to slice through the room. "Joelle Jewell." He kissed my hand, then gave them a look. "My wife." *** The ballroom went dead quiet. Like someone hit pause on the whole place. William? Unbothered. Like he owned the room. "Joelle, want to say something?" Every head turned.