11. Reth
RETH
Smell first. Always the smell first now. Vomit. Sweat. Blood—copper, hers. Still coating my teeth. My tongue keeps finding it, keeps checking, like it might not be true if I check enough times.
The smell that won't leave.
The chains are gone. When? Doesn't matter. Time isn't doing its job anymore. It skips, drops things, I fall through the gaps and land somewhere later with no memory of the falling.
I push up. Everything hurts. Different hurt. Not the door-hurt or the wall-hurt. Those are clean, those are mine, I did those. This is—
Don't.
My hand.
The compass. Black ink, needle pointing—north, always north, toward—
You're my first. My last. Sophia Sinclair.
I said that. In the dream. Before. Before the hair went dark and the eyes went dark and—
The compass is looking at me.
I look at it, and something that isn't quite a thought moves through the haze. Slow. Heavy. Like trying to read words underwater.
Not true.
Not true anymore.
Liar.
The needle points north, and north is her, and what's at the end of the needle now, what's actually there if you follow it all the way—
Mary's face. The poker. Blood on the floor.
No. Wrong direction. Other direction.
Sophia. Green eyes. Gold—
Dark hair. Dark eyes. I always knew your cock would—
Stop.
I can't say it. The word is there and it won't come out. It's stuck somewhere behind my teeth with her blood and the smell that won't fucking leave. Just like her. She won’t leave. She’s everywhere. Always…everywhere. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Greedy hands.
“Leave…” Where are the words? Why don’t they come out?
Leave me alone!
I slam my fist into the floor. There’s no pain. There should be pain. There is pain. But it’s not where it’s supposed to be. It’s on the inside. Deep. Raw. Oozing black and red and rot.
"My son doesn't have a mother."
A voice. Samuel's voice. From—when? Doesn't matter. It's here now, in the gray, looping.
"How could you? She was your sister."
My hands. I look at my hands.
There's nothing on them. Just the compass, the bruising, the split knuckles gone yellow-green at the edges. Nothing else.
I don't…I don't remember.
“Think,” I mutter, rocking back and forth, knocking my fist against my skull. “Think think think.”
Mary's face. Mary's eyes. Open. Wide. Looking at…she’s looking at me.
The poker. I remember the poker. Iron. Firelight catching it. Someone holding it, someone's hand around the handle, and the hand is—whose hand is it?
Valeria's hand. It was Valeria's hand.
Wasn't it?
I was screaming. On the floor.
Blood. So much blood, soaked into the floorboards, into Mary's hair, and my hands were—my hands were where?
Did I—
No.
No, I saw. I was there. I watched Valeria—
I was screaming. On the floor. Beside her. With…with blood on me. I remember the blood on me. I thought it was from being close to her, from holding her, but —
But what if…
What if it wasn't from holding her…
The thought arrives, and I try to push it away and it doesn't go, it just sits there, getting heavier, and underneath it another one starts forming, slower, worse.
Hate. Just for a second.
Mary said—Mary told me—she knew, she'd always known, and something happened in my chest when she said it, something huge and black and—
And then what?
What happened next?
I don't…
I can't…
The poker. Iron. Firelight. A hand.
My hand.
No.
No no no no no.
I'm on my feet. I don't remember standing. My back's against the wall, and I'm pressing into it like I could go through it, like there's somewhere else to be, and the gray light doesn't change and the smell doesn't change and Mary's eyes are right there, right in front of me, open, looking at—
Looking at me.
Did I do it?
Did I kill her?
Did I kill my sister?
"No." Out loud. My voice. Wrecked. "No, I didn't, I was—I saw Valeria, I saw her hands, I saw—"
Did you?
Did you really?
Or did you see what you needed to see?
The compass. I look down at it. Black ink. Needle pointing north. Pointing at Sophia, at the only clean thing, the only —
No. That’s not clean anymore. Valeria’s all over it. Her filth. Her poison. It seeped into the ink, and now she’s in me and I can’t get her out. I’ll never get her out. Just like them. The men. The ones she gave me to.
Blood starts oozing out of the tattoo, along every line. “What the…” I wipe at it, but it only leaks out faster, draining down my wrist, syrup-thick.
“What?” My pulse thunders. “Stop. Make it stop!” Wipe, wipe, wipe.
It’s not your blood, Nazareth.
I still. It’s her voice, and I’m trying to figure out where it’s coming from.
It’s their blood. Every person I had you kill.
I look up, and she's standing in the corner of the cell.
My eyes narrow. “Mary?”
The white dress she’s wearing hangs wrong on her, soaked through, dark at the collar.
Her hair is plastered to the side of her face in thick, wet ropes, and where her throat should be there's a gap, wide and ragged, the edges of it black with dried blood and the inside of it still wet, still glistening, and every time she breathes—if that's breathing—it makes a sound.
A wet, sucking sound. Air moving through a hole that shouldn't be there.
"Mary." My voice cracks on it.
She tilts her head.
The movement is wrong. Too slow at first and then too fast, a snap, like something testing the limits of a body it doesn't quite fit. Her eyes find mine, and they're Mary's eyes—except they're not warm. They're flat. Patient. Amused.
"Mary, I—"
“Look what you did to me, brother.”
Her mouth doesn't move quite right when she says it. Too wide. Holding the smile a half-second too long, the way a mask holds an expression after the face underneath has stopped meaning it.
"I didn't—" My back is against the wall. I can't get farther away, and I'm still trying. "I didn't, I would never, Mary, I—"
She takes a step toward me. Bare feet. Wet, leaving dark prints on the stone, and the prints don't look like water.
“Wouldn't you?”
Another step. The wound in her throat gapes wider as she tilts her head again, and inside it, deep inside it, something moves—not blood, something underneath the blood, dark and shifting—
“You know that hate you felt when I confessed?”
Tears stream down my cheeks. “I don’t hate you.”
“But you did, remember? Just for a second, you hated me enough to want to kill me.”
“No.” My head shakes so hard my teeth rattle. “That’s not true.”
“You hated me, big brother. And that poker was right there.”
"Stop." I'm shaking. The compass is still bleeding, running down my wrist, pooling on the stone between us, and Mary's reflection in it—when did the blood become reflective?
When did it start showing things?
Mary's reflection in the blood doesn't match. Mary standing in front of me. The reflection has dark hair. Dark eyes.
"Stop it!"
“I forgive you.” Her voice, God, her voice changes mid-sentence, starts as Mary's and ends as something else, something lower, something with velvet underneath the words.
“I forgive you, brother. The way Valeria forgives you. The way I always—
"You're not her." My voice breaks apart completely. "You're not—you're not Mary, you're not—"
“Will she forgive you?”
I freeze.
“Sophia. Will she forgive you for what you did?”
The gray folds in, grown thick and iron, pressing down over my shoulders, ballooning inside my lungs. “That wasn’t…that wasn’t my fault. Valeria, she—”
“Always Valeria’s fault, isn’t it?”
“It was her!” I scream, spit flying out of my mouth.
Mary’s smile widens. Too wide. The throat-wound widens with it, and now there's a sound coming from inside it, a voice underneath the voice, layered, wrong. “You’re a coward, Nazareth. Never taking responsibility for your actions. Always blaming Valeria. She didn’t kill me, brother.”
"Get away from me!" My hands are pressed flat against the stone behind me, nails dragging, trying to find purchase on something that doesn't give. "Get away, get away, you're not real, you're not real."
Mary—the thing wearing Mary, the thing with the gap in its throat and Valeria's smile stretched too wide over Mary's face—leans down. Slow. The wet sucking sound of the wound breathing in time with her movement.
“Did you kill me, Nazareth?”
Her face is an inch from mine.
“Did you?”
“No!”
My hands. Mary’s blood. A poker.
"I don't know," I whisper. Tears and snot and the taste of blood still in my mouth. "I don't know, I don't know, I don't—"
“Such a pretty boy,” she says—and it's not Mary's voice anymore at all, it's only Valeria's, coming out of Mary's mouth, out of the wound in Mary's throat, out of everywhere at once. “Even when you're falling apart.”
I close my eyes. Press my hands over my ears. I scream until there's nothing left in my chest to scream with, and when I finally stop, when I finally open my eyes, the corner of the cell is empty.
No Mary. No blood on the floor. No wet footprints.
Did I kill her?
I don't know.
I don't know anything anymore.
I slide down the wall. Knees to chest. Hands over my ears like that does anything.
"I don't know," I say. To the dark. To her. To nobody. "I don't—I don't know, I don't remember, I don't—"
Somewhere, very far down, underneath the not-knowing, something starts to feel less like a question and more like an answer.
I killed…
I press my forehead against my knees and stay very still, because if I'm still enough, maybe it isn't true. Maybe stillness is the only thing left that I can control.
There’s a sound. Like…like…a wrapper. A candy wrapper.
My head jerks to the side, and I suck in a breath when I see the heart-shaped lollipop lying next to me on the floor.
Pink.
I don't move. I don't breathe. I stare at it like it might disappear if I look away. Like Mary disappeared, like the blood disappeared, like everything in this room that isn't stone or pain disappears the moment I stop watching it.
It doesn't disappear.
It's just there. Pink, heart-shaped, the wrapper catching what little light exists in this gray nothing-place, and for a moment I can't move at all because my mind can't decide what category to put it in. Hallucination. Memory. Trap.
Halloween night.
The thought arrives quietly. Not loud like Mary's voice, not layered and wrong. Just—quiet. Familiar. A voice I know the shape of even when I can't hear it clearly.
Even monsters deserve love sometimes.
I reach for it. My hand is shaking and I don't trust it, I don't trust anything right now, but I reach anyway, and my fingers close around the wrapper and it's solid. Real. Crinkles under my fingers the way real things crinkle.
“Sophia,” I whisper. Hold the candy.
Pink. Heart-shaped. The one that started everything, the one I kept until…
Until I don't know when. Until everything became a room with a drain in it.
I press it against my chest. Both hands around it now, holding it the way you hold something that might be the only true thing left in a world that has stopped being reliable.
“Sophia Sinclair.”
Green eyes. Gold hair. A kitchen in Paris, sunlight, the smell of cinnamon. Her hands on my face. Her thumb on my scar.
“I’m sorry.” Fresh tears spill out. “I’m so fucking sorry.
I don’t know what happened,” I continue, like she’s here.
Like Sophia’s here and she’s listening. “In this room, I don’t know what happened…
with her. But I want it to stop. And I need you to love me.
” A sob breaks loose. “Please…please still love me. I’ll do anything. ”
I'm rocking. I don't realize it until I notice the movement, back and forth, the way you rock something to make it stop crying, except there's nothing to rock except myself.
"Just don't leave." My voice cracks all the way through the crying.
"Please don't leave me. I know what I am.
I know what she's made me into. I know what's…
what's inside me, what I'm capable of, what I might have—" The thought of Mary surfaces, and I shove it back down before it can finish, before it can become the thing it almost became a few minutes ago. "I love you. Always you. Only you.”
The compass on my hand. Black ink. North.
I trace it with my thumb—not pressing, not trying to remove it, just touching it the way you'd touch something fragile, something you're afraid might break if you're not careful.
"Please," I say into nothing. "Please still love me.”
I press the lollipop against my lips, eyes closed, breathing the faint sugar-smell.
When I open my eyes, there’s a needle in my hand. The lollipop…there was no lollipop.
I stare at my own hand holding the needle, and for a moment I don't know whose hand it is. It looks like mine. The compass is there, the bruised knuckles, the lines I know. But it doesn't feel like mine. It feels like something is wearing my hand the way Mary was wearing—was wearing—
Don't.
The needle is very close to my arm.
I watch it get closer the way you watch something happen to someone else. Distant. Slow.
There's a voice somewhere—small, very far away, sounding almost like me, the me from before, the me that used to be certain about things.
And it's saying no, don't, put it down, and the voice gets smaller the closer the needle gets, until it's not even a voice anymore, just a feeling, just a pressure, easily overridden.
The needle finds the vein like it already knows where it is. Like it's done this so many times the hand doesn't need instruction anymore.
The plunger goes down.
The warmth arrives the way it always arrives—total, immediate, a wave that starts at the point of the needle and spreads outward until it's everywhere, until the gray light softens, until Mary's eyes at the edge of the room go soft and distant, until the smell fades, until the guilt fades, until everything that was sharp a moment ago goes round and warm and far away.
Sophia, I think, as the warmth takes the last of it.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
The needle slips from my fingers. I don't feel it land. The gray light holds.
The compass, black ink, north—still there, still pointing, even as everything around it goes soft and warm and quiet.
Even as I go somewhere else. Somewhere with no Mary. No blood. No Valeria.
Just warmth.
Just nothing.
Just—