Journal of Elion Karsis — On Knowledge, and the Refusal to Act
I did not discover it through betrayal.
I discovered it through pattern.
Soraya became careful in a way that did not belong to fear. Not evasive. Not guilty. Deliberate. The kind of precision that appears when someone is accounting for more than one gravity at once. Letters routed too cleanly. Silence timed, not emotional. A pause after receiving certain messages where she did not look at me—but did not hide either.
Then came the test.
Dracula wrote back to her with a warning that was almost tender in its construction. Not a threat. Not an order. A concern, placed like a blade wrapped in velvet: Do not let him find out. You know what he would do to you.
That line was not for her.
It was for me.
She watched me read it reflected in her eyes. Not the words—my reaction to the implication. She waited to see if I would stiffen, if anger would spike, if I would close the distance or create it violently. She waited to see if I would become the man her father had described.
I said, evenly, “That sounds like a family matter.”
She laughed. Soft. Dismissive. As if nothing else were moving behind the walls of the world. As if there weren’t letters passing between a god and the woman I love. As if this were simply weather.
“It’s not like that,” she said.
That was not a lie.
It was also not an explanation.
I understood then that she was not hiding him from me.
She was measuring whether I would try to own the knowledge.
I did not.
Anyone else—any other variable—I would have removed. Immediately. Permanently. I have ended systems for less intimate breaches than this. I have killed men for proximity alone.
But this was not proximity.
This was history.
She writes to him because he cannot misunderstand her. She stays with me because I do not try to finish her sentences. Those roles do not overlap. They balance. And I will not collapse her into a simpler shape to soothe my pride.
Dracula does not know that I know.
That is the most important part.
He fears me in the abstract. He imagines a violence that would spill outward, dramatic and irreversible. He imagines jealousy. Control. Possession. He does not imagine restraint—because restraint is not something his kind mistakes for power.
He warns her about me.
He should be warned about us.
I love her. That does not mean I will reduce her to safety. It means I will let her stand between monsters without turning her into a prize or a casualty.
If she ever stops writing to him, I will know before he does.
If she ever lies to me, I will leave before she notices.
If he ever realizes I am aware, it will be because he miscalculated—not because I announced myself.
For now, I say nothing.
Silence is not consent.
It is strategy.
And in this, at least, I will not be predictable.