Blood Marked: The Bone Moon Alphas

CHAPTER 9 The Quiet Mind

Silas Crowe did not come for me that night.

After Kieran marked me, I expected him. Jax had kicked down my basement door at 2AM just to stare at Kieran's crescent on my collarbone and then growled "You still have space for more" and left a second lightning bolt next to the first one, right over my pulse, with a kiss that made my knees buckle. Rhys had shown up at breakfast and silently traced all three marks with his cold fingers and whispered "Beautiful" so only I could hear, and his blood-moon glowed.

Silas stayed away. Which was worse.

Because I could feel him now. Ever since he tried to read me in the Archive, a thin silver thread had connected us. I could feel his thoughts like static at the edge of my own — not words, but pressure. And for two days, that pressure had been a headache of pure, raw jealousy.

He's spiraling, Nyx said as I sat in the Bone Archive trying to hide. It was the only place Lira wouldn't follow me because the books bit her. His mind is too loud. He needs silence or he'll burn out.

"How do you know that?"

Because I'm you, and you're starting to feel all four of them like extra limbs. Stop pretending you don't.

I was pretending very hard. My wrist buzzed where Jax's marks were. My collarbone tingled where Kieran's shadow curled and Rhys's moon pulsed.

The Archive door opened without wind. Silas.

He looked terrible. His perfect Eastern uniform was wrinkled. His silver-blond hair was messy like he'd pulled it. Dark circles so deep they looked like bruises. His silver eyes, usually so cold and clinical, were bloodshot.

"You didn't come," I said before I could stop myself.

"You didn't call," he said, voice hoarse.

"I didn't know I was supposed to —"

He crossed the room in three steps and slammed his hands on the table on either side of me, caging me in. Up close, he was shaking.

"Do you know what it's like?" he whispered, and for the first time, his perfect control cracked. "Three hundred wolves. All day. Every thought. She wants to fail her exam. He wants to f**k her. He wants to kill Kieran and take his title. She wants to cut your throat because you have three marks. And then you. You walk in with no thoughts at all. Silence. The first silence I've heard since I was six years old."

His breath hitched.

"And then you let them mark you. And now I can hear them in your head too. Kieran's possessiveness. Jax's obsession. Rhys's devotion. It's so loud, Kaia. You made my silence loud."

I reached up without thinking and put my hands on his cheeks. His skin was burning.

"Then turn it off," I said softly.

"I can't —"

"Let me."

I did what Rhys taught me but backwards. Instead of pulling power out, I pushed quiet in.

I closed my eyes and imagined all the noise in his head — the screaming library he lived in — and I imagined my own mind, the little circle of snow Nyx had shown me.

"Come here," I whispered out loud.

Silas gasped as I yanked him — not physically, but mentally — into my mindscape.

Suddenly we weren't in the Archive. We were in his mindscape. A vast, burning library, books flying, voices screaming from every shelf, floor to ceiling on fire.

In the center, exactly like he had shown me before, a small circle of untouched snow. And me, sitting in it.

I held out my hand.

He stared, then stumbled into the snow circle and collapsed to his knees in front of me, burying his face in my lap, shaking.

In the real world, his body had collapsed too, his head in my lap, his hands fisted in my uniform.

"It's quiet," he sobbed, actually sobbed, this beautiful, terrible boy who never showed emotion. "It's quiet."

I stroked his hair. "Is this what it's like for you every day?"

"Every second. Since the Bone Moon gave me this cursed gift." He looked up at me, silver eyes wet. "My own mother wears a mind-blocker around me because she doesn't want me hearing her think I was a mistake."

My heart broke. I leaned down and kissed his forehead, his wet eyelashes, his cheeks, tasting salt.

"You are not a mistake," I said fiercely. "You are not a curse."

He grabbed my face and kissed me. Not like Kieran's starved kiss or Jax's storm or Rhys's reverent one. This was curious, searching, like he was trying to memorize my mouth with his mind. He kissed like he was reading a language.

When we broke apart, the burning library in his mind was out. Completely. Ashes and snow.

"How?" he whispered, touching his own temples, amazed. "I can't hear them. Anyone. Just you. Just your voice."

Oh, we did it now, Nyx purred. We broke the mind-reader.

In the real Archive, the floating books that had been rattling violently all settled.

Silas looked down at my hand. On my inner wrist, next to Jax's lightning, a new mark was forming — a tiny silver eye, blinking slowly, then closing. His mark.

He traced it with his fingertip and shivered. "Mine. My silence has a mark."

He leaned in, his lips against my ear, and whispered the one thing he had never let anyone hear, not even his brothers, his deepest secret thought, giving it to me as a gift:

I love you. I have loved you since you had no thoughts and I thought you were the only person who could ever love me back without hearing how broken I am.

Outside the Archive, a howl went up — Kieran, Jax, and Rhys had felt the fourth bond click into place through the link, and the volcano shook.

Four marks now. Four Alphas bound.

And deep under the mountain, the bone-white tree in Lucien's office cracked down the middle and started bleeding silver sap.

The Bone Moon had felt it too.