We walk back together, neither rushing nor lingering. Just moving forward. This time, it doesn’t feel like I’m running from anything at all.
26
TINY
Idon’t realize how much my life has shifted until the garage falls quiet and my hands don’t know what to reach for next. No bike half torn apart, no engine waiting for my anger, no noise loud enough to drown out the thoughts I used to refuse to hear.
There is only stillness.
It creeps in late at night, after the compound settles and the brothers drift off to their corners of restlessness and routine. I stand alone under the fluorescent lights, grease still on my knuckles, and realize there’s nothing left to fix, so I feel whole.
For most of my life, silence meant danger. It meant I’d lost something. It meant the other shoe was about to drop. Peace was never a place you stayed; it was something you passed through before the next hit landed.
But now the quiet feels… occupied.
I wipe my hands on a rag and glance toward the hallway without meaning to. Toward the room where Syvannah sleeps, curled on her side, her breath slow and steady, trusting the world enough to close her eyes.
Trustingme.
The weight of that presses on my chest harder than any fight ever has.
I’ve buried bodies. I’ve buried pasts. I’ve buried pieces of myself so deep that I forgot they were still alive. But loving her?
That’s the one thing I can’t outrun, grease-stain, or outmuscle. The scariest part is that I don’t want to.
I tell myself it’s temporary. That whatever this is will settle, quiet down, and find its place among the other things I carry. But it doesn’t. It follows me from the garage into the days that come after, until loving Syvannah no longer feels like a choice but becomes inevitable.
After Pearl’s funeral, the compound doesn’t feel as haunted as it used to. Still heavy, sure. Death doesn’t pack up and leave just because you lit candles and said prayers, but the air moves more easily. The brothers move more easily. Syvannah breathes more easily. And I watch it like a man who’s finally learned what peace costs.
Syvannah doesn’t pretend healing is pretty. Some mornings she wakes stiff, jaw tight, eyes distant, as if she’s climbing out of a hole only she can see. Other days, she laughs at something stupid Torch says, and it hits me so hard I have to look away before my brothers notice the shine behind my eyes.
I kill the lights in the garage one by one, leaving only the hum of the emergency strip over the door. The quiet follows me, heavy on my shoulders, down the corridor that smells like leather and old wood. I don’t mean to head toward our room. I just… do. But before I reach the stairs, I catch the sound of running water and a soft hum drifting from the kitchen, and my feet change direction without asking my permission.
Syvannah stands at the sink, barefoot, hair still damp from the shower, wearing my hoodie like it belongs to her. The sleeves hang past her hands, and she keeps pushing them up with her knuckles while she rinses a mug that doesn’t need rinsing.
I lean in the doorway and watch her. She hums something soft under her breath.
My chest tightens. “Hey,” I say.
She glances over her shoulder. “Hey.” She offers me a small, easy smile. The kind she didn’t have months ago.
I push off the frame and step into the kitchen. A distant voice drifts through the open window. A bike revs somewhere near the fence.
“You busy tonight?” I ask.
Syvannah turns fully, lifting her brows. “Depends.”
“On?”
“Why are you asking?”
I scratch at the back of my neck. My pulse is loud in my ears, stupid for a man my size. “I want to take you out.”
Her mouth curves, making my heart skip a beat. “Out where?”
“Somewhere not here.”
Syvannah studies my face, reading past the words. “Like… a date?” The tease in her voice sets my body on fire.