Claimed By Silver

Chapter Two: Something Underneath

Freya POV

I don't tell anyone about him.

That's the first mistake, probably — I know that even as I'm making it. Naomi would want to call the police, and the police have never once believed me about anything that's happened to the men in my life, so what would I even say? A man followed me home, told me I belonged to him, and then vanished into thin air. They'd write me down as unstable. Maybe they'd be right.

Instead I go to work. I go to the gallery on Tuesdays and Thursdays, hanging new pieces for the spring show, adjusting lighting until the shadows fall the way the artists want them to, answering emails from collectors who ask the same three questions in different orders. I go to the coffee shop the other three days, and I walk home the same four blocks every night because changing my route feels like giving him something — an acknowledgment that he's changed anything at all.

He doesn't come back for a week. I almost start to believe the doorstep was some kind of fever dream, a stress hallucination brought on by too many drinks and not enough sleep. Almost. But I catch myself doing things I haven't done in months — checking the deadbolt three times instead of twice, glancing at reflections in shop windows instead of just my own face, listening for footsteps that don't come. My body remembers him even when my mind tries to talk itself out of it.

Naomi notices, of course. She notices everything, which is either the best or worst thing about being her friend depending on the week.

"You've been weird," she says over lunch, poking at a salad she's clearly not enjoying. "Weirder than usual. And that's saying something."

"Thanks." I say.

"I mean it nicely." She squints at me. "Did something happen with that guy from the bar?"

My stomach does something complicated. "What guy."

"The one by the door. The one I told you to talk to." She sets her fork down, giving me the full weight of her attention, which is somehow worse than if she'd let it go. "You've got a look."

"I don't have a look."

"You have a look, Freya. It's the same look you get when you're hiding something you think is going to blow up your whole life if you say it out loud." She says this lightly, like a joke, but there's real concern under it, the kind that comes from six years of watching me flinch away from anything that resembles hope. "You know you can tell me anything. Even the insane stuff."

Especially the insane stuff, I think, but I don't say it. I don't tell her about silver eyes or a voice that could make a grieving man's face go white or the way I lay awake afterward turning the question over and over — why aren't you more afraid — until it stopped sounding like a question and started sounding like an accusation.

"It's nothing," I say instead. "I'm just tired."

She doesn't believe me. I can tell by the way her mouth tightens, the way she lets the subject drop instead of pushing, the particular kindness of somebody choosing not to corner you even when they know you're lying. It makes me feel worse, somehow, than if she'd called me out directly.

Marcus's brother finds me on a Thursday.

I'm closing up the gallery alone, the kind of grey afternoon that turns to full dark by five without any warning in between, when I hear the door chime behind me. I turn expecting a last-minute browser and instead find Caleb, a man I recognize immediately even though I've only met him once, at a funeral eighteen months ago, both of us wearing black and neither of us able to look at each other.

"Freya." He says my name like it costs him something.

"Caleb. Hi." I don't know what else to say. His brother died at a dinner table with eight witnesses and no explanation, and Caleb has spent the year and a half since then looking at me like I'm evidence of something he can't quite prove, something just out of reach that he can feel in his teeth.

"I need to talk to you." He steps further inside, and something about the way he moves — too fast, too tight, like a man holding something together with his bare hands — makes the back of my neck prickle. I glance toward the door, an old habit, checking the exit the way I always do now. "About Marcus."

"Caleb, I don't know what happened to him. I've told you that already—"

"I know what you told me." He's close now, closer than a stranger should stand, and there's an edge under his voice I've never heard from him before, something almost feral, something that doesn't match the quiet, careful man I remember from the funeral. "I've been doing research. Since he died. There's a pattern, Freya. Do you know that?"

"Caleb—"

"Every man who's ever so much as bought you a drink." He pulls his phone out, hand shaking, and for one horrible second I think he's actually going to show me — names and dates lined up like a ledger of everyone I've ever failed to save. "Nine of them. In six years. I have a list. I've read every autopsy report I could get my hands on, called in favours, and none of it makes sense unless you're the one thing they all have in common."

"You think I did something to your brother?" My voice cracks on the question, all the old grief coming up at once, sour and familiar. "I loved him, Caleb. Or I was starting to. I don't know what happened at that dinner any more than you do."

"Then explain it to me. Explain why every man who gets close to you ends up dead within the year, and you just keep walking around like it's nothing, like it's just bad luck, like—"

"I think you should leave."

The voice isn't mine.

I don't see Sterling cross the room. That's the part that will bother me later, lying awake trying to reconstruct it — one second the doorway is empty, and the next he's between us, a wall of black jacket and stillness, and Caleb's already stumbling back like he's been shoved, even though nobody's touched him.

"Who the hell are you—" Caleb starts, and then stops, because Sterling has turned to look at him, and whatever Caleb sees in that look empties something out of his face in real time.

"I said leave." Sterling doesn't raise his voice. He doesn't need to. There's something underneath it now, some register that drops half an octave into a sound that doesn't feel entirely human, a pressure in the air like the moment before a storm breaks.

Caleb turns and leaves. He doesn't argue, doesn't posture, doesn't do any of the things a man his size and his grief should do. He just turns and walks out into the grey afternoon like his legs have made the decision without him, and the door chimes shut behind him, and then it's just me and Sterling and the smell of rain that seems to follow him into every room he enters.

"You didn't have to do that," I say, when I trust my voice again.

"He was frightening you."

"He's grieving. His brother died. He's allowed to be angry."

Something moves across Sterling's face — not quite a flinch, more like the memory of one, gone before I can properly name it. "His brother's death isn't your fault."

"How would you know that?"

He doesn't answer. His silver eyes track over me instead, slow and assessing, the way you'd check something for damage after a fall. "Are you hurt?"

"No. Sterling—"

"You should go home." He says it like an instruction, not a suggestion, already half-turned toward the door like the conversation's finished whether I agree to that or not.

"That's it? You show up, you scare off a grieving man twice your— actually, I don't even know how old you are — and then you just leave?"

He stops. Doesn't turn around right away. When he finally does, there's something almost like amusement pulling at one corner of his mouth, there and gone so fast I could almost believe I invented it. "Would you rather I stayed?"

The honest answer catches in my throat, ugly and complicated, because some small treacherous part of me actually would. "I'd rather you explained yourself. Any of it. What you are, why you're following me, why grown men go pale and silent the second you open your mouth."

"Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because you're not ready to hear it, and I haven't finished deciding how much you need to know." He says this the way other people discuss weather, flat and unbothered, like my right to information is a resource he's rationing entirely on his own terms.

"That's not your decision to make."

"It is, actually." He steps closer, and I have to fight the urge to step back, some old animal wiring firing warnings my body doesn't seem to fully believe anymore. "Everything about you is mine to decide now. I know that's not what you want to hear. I don't particularly care whether you like it."

The words should terrify me more than they do. Instead they land somewhere strange, low in my chest, a feeling I don't have a clean name for — anger, yes, but tangled with something dangerously close to relief. Like being handled by someone who isn't asking permission is easier, somehow, than six years of managing my own fear entirely alone, entirely unwitnessed.

I hate that. I hate that I notice it. I hate that some part of me has already started cataloguing the sound of his voice the way I catalogue exits.

"Get out of my gallery," I say instead, because it's the only sentence I can find that doesn't betray anything else underneath it.

He looks at me for a long moment — that same cataloguing look from the doorstep, the scar through his brow catching the gallery's track lighting — and then, unbelievably, he almost smiles. It transforms his whole face for half a second, makes him look less like a carved thing and more like a man who used to know how to be one, and it's somehow worse than the coldness ever was.

"Lock the door behind me," he says. "And Freya — stop walking the same route home every night. It's not smart."

"You've been watching my route."

"I've been watching everything." He says it without a trace of shame, like an apology has never once occurred to him as necessary or owed. "Lock the door."

He's gone the way he always is — not a retreat, just an absence where a second ago there was a person. I stand alone in the gallery for a long time afterward, staring at the door, my pulse doing something unsteady and wrong, and think about how easily he made a grown man disappear from a room using nothing but his voice.

I lock the door. Twice. It doesn't feel like enough.

That night I do something I haven't let myself do in over a year. I go looking.

I sit cross-legged on my bed with my laptop, a mug of tea gone cold beside me, and I type in every name I've been trying not to think about, one after another. Ethan. Marcus. The two before them, further back, names that still make my chest go tight in a way that has nothing to do with love and everything to do with guilt. I read coroner's language I've read before — anomalous, undetermined, consistent with — and this time, instead of closing the tab the way I always do, I keep going. I search wider. I search for pattern instead of grief, for structure instead of sorrow, because grief has never once given me an answer and I'm tired of waiting for it to.

What I find doesn't have a name yet, not really — forums full of people who sound unhinged, message boards where strangers swap stories that all rhyme with mine in ways that make my skin crawl. Men who died protecting women who didn't ask to be protected. Deaths that don't add up on paper, injuries no human hands should be able to inflict, silence from authorities who clearly know more than they're saying, redacted files referenced by people who shouldn't have had access to them.

One thread, buried nine pages deep under years of dead links and abandoned usernames, has a phrase that makes my skin go cold.

Bonded ones don't get to choose who else gets close.

I don't understand it. Not yet. I read it four times, then five, my tea forgotten and going colder, and something about it settles into my chest the same way Sterling's silver eyes did — unwelcome, impossible to unsee, already rearranging the furniture of my understanding whether I invited it in or not. I bookmark the page. I close the laptop before I can talk myself out of believing any of it.

For the first time in six years, I fall asleep with a question instead of a familiar grief: not why does this happen to me, but who decided it should, and what gives him the right.

I don't hear footsteps outside my window that night. I don't need to. I already know he's there.