Roman was bold. Intelligent. Self-assured. His presence was a big one, but he’d been careful not to take up too much space around me. He made himself smaller to make me feel bigger, and that gesture felt like security somehow.
Safety.
He smiled at me often, and he never—not once—tried to force me to speak.
I’d always favored a whisper but Foster’s death had shocked me into a silence I couldn’t find my way out of. My brain knew how to form words, and I felt letters on the tip of my tongue but there was a barrier they couldn’t get past.
Maybe it was fear.
Maybe it was indifference.
Maybe I was like all the men who’d investigated Foster’s fall and had just given up.
CHAPTERFIVE
ROMAN
His knuckles were red. Split open. Bruises were forming beneath the surface of his pale skin, and I almost couldn’t see it through the crimson haze circling my vision.
“Sebastian?”
He peered up at me. Tears were perched on the ends of his eyelashes.
What swept through me then was a wild, barbaric sensation that left my insides quaking.
My nostrils flared. “Sebastian, did someone… hurt you?”
The words tasted like blood on my tongue, and it was a near miracle I’d gotten them past my lips without seething.
The hood Sebastian favored swept the tight skin of his forehead when he shook his head. He held his battered hand in front of him, opening and closing his fist as though he was double checking his knuckles still did what they were supposed to.
“Did you hit someone?”
That… wasn’t likely.
Sebastian wasn’t one to summon destruction. He fled from violence and avoided humans as though he wasn’t one himself.
He shook his head again. This time when his knuckles hinged inward, he left them folded into a loose fist and pressed it to the palm of his other hand.
Sebastian often used gestures to tell me stories, punctuating his past with flicks of his wrists and snaps of his fingers. He answered my questions with a thumbs up or thumbs down and tore at the threads of my sofa when he was feeling particularly anxious.
Elbows on my knees, I studied his movements and tried to discern what he was telling me now. His palm rotated on top of his wrist, back and forth as though it was opening and closing.
“You punched a door?” I guessed.
Sebastian’s injured hand fell to his lap when he nodded. A sigh left him, making his lips tremble, and he used his thumb to point at his chest.
“You punched your own door?”
His forefinger extended, working in tandem with his thumb to make the letter L.
I thought for a moment. “Locker? You punched your locker door?”
Sebastian gave me a thumbs up, his hand quivering before falling to a heap on the sofa that now belonged to him. He wrapped his pinky finger around a loose thread and tugged hard enough to rip it from the cushion.
“Are you in pain?” I asked him, and the second he took to answer was a second too long. My shoulders stiffened at the weak nod he gave me, and the soft, frustrated sound he made felt like a punch in the kidneys.
“Go to him…”