Chapter 3 Room 214

POV: Sable Voss

Room 214 was smaller than I expected. Two narrow beds, one desk, a bathroom with a door that didn’t lock right. No privacy anywhere, which meant privacy was something I’d have to make for myself, out of timing and luck and careful math.

Caius was already there when I walked in, shirtless, an ice pack pressed to his ribs where I’d landed that body shot earlier. He didn’t look up right away, just let me feel his eyes on me a beat before he actually raised them.

“You hit harder than you look,” he said. “Where’d you learn that?”

“Practice.” I set my duffel on the empty bed and kept my back to him longer than necessary, buying myself a second to breathe.

“Practice,” he repeated, like he was testing the word for holes. “Voss men don’t train like that. I’ve watched your father fight. All power, no patience. You’ve got both.”

I didn’t answer. Answering too much was how people slipped.

~~

The shower was its own kind of war. I waited until he stepped out to grab water down the hall, then moved fast binding loosened just enough to breathe, checked and rechecked in the mirror, voice tested low under the water so no one outside the door would catch anything higher than it should be. My hands stayed steady through all of it. They had to.

When I came out, he was back, lying on his bed like he owned the whole room, tossing a water bottle at me without even glancing up. I caught it clean.

“Good reflexes,” he said. “For someone who almost missed the ropes twice today.”

“I didn’t miss anything.”

“You flinched once. Second round.” He finally looked at me, eyes sharp, assessing. “Right before you hit me. That’s the only tell you’ve got.”

I filed that away like a wound I’d have to watch.

~~~

Rain started somewhere around midnight, soft against the window, the kind of sound that made silence feel bigger instead of smaller. Down the hall, a door banged shut, followed by laughter, then something quieter two rooms down,  low voices, a rhythm that didn’t need explaining.. Those boys were literally furking each other?.  Nobody here pretended not to hear it. Nobody cared.

“Took me a month to stop flinching at that,” Caius said, nodding toward the wall. “Everybody does at first. Then you realize nobody’s watching who does what with who. This place doesn’t care about that stuff. Never has.”

“Must be nice,” I said, quieter than I meant to.

“You don’t sound like you believe that.”

“I believe plenty of things I don’t say out loud.”

He propped himself up on one elbow, studying me in a way that made my skin feel too thin. “That supposed to be mysterious, Voss? Or is that just how rich kids talk?”

“Maybe I just don’t waste words on people who don’t need them.”

His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “There it is again. That thing you do. Careful. Controlled. Like you’re always half a second from getting caught doing something.”

My pulse kicked up hard enough that I was sure he could hear it in the quiet room. “You analyze all your roommates like this?”

“Only the interesting ones.” He lay back down, staring at the ceiling now instead of me, which somehow made it worse. “Most guys who walk in here are exactly what they look like. You’re not.”

I didn’t trust myself to respond to that…

The rain kept going, steady, and neither of us moved to sleep. I lay stiff on my side, listening to his breathing shift and settle a few feet away, hyperaware of every inch of distance between our beds, not enough distance, not in a room this small, not with a body this close doing this much noticing.

I thought about Silas. Wherever he was tonight, some train car, some barracks, some version of freedom he’d wanted his whole life, I hoped it felt lighter than this. I hoped he wasn’t lying awake replaying our last five minutes together the way I was.

I missed him with a kind of ache I hadn’t let myself feel until right then, alone in the dark with a stranger three feet away who saw more of me than he realized.

“You’re not what I expected, Voss,” Caius said into the quiet, voice lower now, rougher at the edges from exhaustion or something else.

I didn’t move. “What’d you expect?”

“Another Cassian Voss who is cold, boring. Easy to read.” A pause long enough that I thought he’d fallen asleep. Then: “I don’t know if that’s a good thing yet.”

Neither did I. That was the problem.

I kept my eyes on the ceiling, willing my heartbeat to slow, willing the heat crawling up my neck to have absolutely nothing to do with the way his voice had sounded just then, rough, unguarded, aimed right at whatever was underneath the version of me he thought he was talking to.

My phone buzzed once under my pillow.

Not my phone actually. Silas’s phone. The one I’d stolen along with his name and his life, the one that was only supposed to ring for people who thought they were reaching him.

I went still… The screen lit up faint blue in the dark, and I turned my head just enough to read it without moving anything else.

Unknown Number: I know what you did.

Four words, no name, no context. Enough to stop my heart cold in my chest. I stared at the screen until my eyes burned, running through every possibility, a bluff, a threat, someone who actually knew, someone who’d seen the vault footage, seen the haircut, seen anything at all. Across the room, Caius’s breathing had changed.

Slower than before and more careful now. The kind of breathing someone does when they’re trying very hard to sound asleep.

He wasn’t asleep. He was listening…