Chapter 46 Chapter 46

Chapter 46 Chapter 46
~ Elena's POV

Damian came back after midnight.
I'd fallen asleep sitting up against the headboard, waiting for him, and I woke to the sound of the shower running and the smell of something metallic clinging faintly to the air of our room, gone by the time I was awake enough to be sure I hadn't imagined it. When he finally slid into bed beside me, I asked him where he'd been, and he kissed my forehead and said, "Nothing you need to worry about," in the same flat, closed voice he'd used for a year now whenever he wanted a conversation to end before it started.
I let it go. I had my own secret sitting heavy in my chest by then, Liz's voice looping through it… someone else, someone already inside these walls, and it felt hypocritical to demand honesty from him while I was sitting on my own.
But I started watching people differently after that night. Really watching them. The way you watch a room once you know one of the pieces of furniture in it might be lying to you.

~ The Next Morning
Me and Marco were in the kitchen, early, before most of the house was awake, and his phone buzzed once against the counter. He looked at the screen for less than a second before flipping it face-down and sliding it into his pocket, jaw tight, shoulders drawn up around his ears like he was bracing for a blow that hadn't landed yet.
"Everything okay?" I asked, pouring coffee I didn't really want, just to have something to do with my hands.
"Fine." He didn't look at me. "Just work."
"You do a lot of work before six in the morning."
"Somebody has to." He grabbed his own cup and headed for the door faster than a man heading toward "just work" usually walked.
I watched him go and thought about Liz's smile in that basement room, the satisfaction on her face when she'd said someone already inside these walls. Marco had been at Damian's side since before I existed in this story at all, trusted with things I wasn't even allowed to know the shape of. If it wasn't him, the thought was ridiculous. If it was him, it would break something in this house that I wasn't sure could be put back together.
I told myself it wasn't him. I told myself that for three days, watching him flinch at his phone four more times, watching him disappear for stretches of the afternoon that nobody, including Damian, seemed to be tracking.
On the fourth day, I stopped telling myself anything and decided to ask.

~ In The Garage
I found him alone near the cars, wiping his hands on a rag though I never once saw him touch an engine, which told me the rag was less about grease and more about having something to do with his hands while his mind was somewhere else entirely.
"Marco."
He didn't jump, but something in his spine went rigid, the particular stillness of a man who has just heard his name said in a tone he doesn't like. "Elena. Shouldn't you be inside?"
"Shouldn't you tell me what's going on with you?"
"Nothing's going on with me." He said it too fast, too flat, the words falling out of him in the same clipped rhythm Damian used when he wanted a door shut. It was strange, hearing that same tone come out of Marco, who had always talked to me like an actual person instead of a problem to be managed.
"You've been disappearing for days. You flinch every time your phone rings. You won't look at me when you talk to me anymore." I crossed my arms, refusing to be waved off the way he clearly wanted me to be. "I'm not stupid, Marco."
"I never said you were."
"Then stop treating me like it."
Something cracked across his face, just for a second, just long enough for me to see it before he smoothed it back over into practiced calm. It looked like fear. Real fear, the kind I hadn't seen on him even when men were shooting at us a while ago.
"Elena, I need you to trust me on this," he said, quieter now. "Please. Just… not right now. Not yet."
"Not yet what? Marco, if something's wrong—"
"Nothing is wrong." His voice sharpened again, defensive in a way that told me the opposite was true. "Drop it. Please. For your own good, drop it."
For your own good. It was the kind of phrase people used right before they lied to your face, and I recognized it because Damian had used it on me a hundred times over the past year, right before handing me another piece of a truth I hadn't been ready for.
"Fine," I said, though it wasn't fine at all. "But if you're keeping something from Damian that could get one of us killed, I will find out. And I won't be as gentle about it as I'm being right now."
He looked at me for a long moment, something unreadable moving behind his eyes… guilt, maybe, or grief, or both tangled together so tightly he couldn't separate them even if he'd wanted to. "I know," he said quietly. "I know you would."
He walked away before I could ask him what that meant.

~ Later That Day
I told Damian, in pieces, careful pieces, that Marco had been acting strange. I didn't mention Liz's words directly, that felt like handing over a weapon before I understood what it was actually capable of, but I said enough to make his expression sharpen into the particular stillness he wore right before he made a decision he wasn't going to explain to me.
"I've noticed," was all he said.
"And?"
"And I'm handling it."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one you're getting right now." He pulled me against him before I could argue further, pressing a kiss to the top of my head in the way he always did when he wanted to end a conversation without actually winning it. "Let me look into it before you start building theories, pup. You have a habit of running headfirst into fires before you check if they're the ones actually meant to burn you."
I wanted to tell him he was one to talk. I wanted to ask him what had pulled him out of our bed at midnight two nights ago and left the metallic ghost of something ugly clinging to his skin when he finally came back. But I held it in the same way he was holding everything back from me, and told myself that was fair, that this was simply how things worked between us, a marriage built out of matching silences, each of us guarding pieces of the truth we weren't ready to hand the other.
That night, lying awake beside him while he slept, I thought about the way Marco's face had cracked in the garage. The fear underneath the composure. The for your own good.
Whatever he was hiding, I didn't think it was betrayal, not really, not in the way Liz had implied. It looked too much like grief for that. Too much like a man drowning quietly and trying to keep everyone else from noticing the water rising around him.
But grief and betrayal, I was learning, in a house like this one, had a habit of wearing each other's clothes.