12. Sophia
SOPHIA
The drive back up the mountain takes three hours from the airstrip.
I press my forehead to the cool glass and watch the trees blur past, tall pines crowding the narrow road like silent witnesses.
I’ve only ever seen this route going down—the day Ian and I fled the house, leaving Reth behind in a nightmare we couldn’t save him from.
My heart had been cracked wide open then, the same way it is now. Every mile we put between us and him that day felt like another piece of my soul being torn away. I kept thinking the same desperate prayer I’m whispering inside my chest right now.
Come back to me. Please, God, just come back to me.
The first time I traveled this road, I was blindfolded, wrists bound so tightly the rope bit into my skin, terror clawing at my throat.
I remember the sharp smell of pine and gasoline, the cold air leaking under the car door, the way my body catalogued every sharp turn and dip like it could somehow save me.
I had been so sure I was driving toward death, having no idea I was driving toward him—the man who would ruin me and save me in the same breath, the monster who became my whole world.
Now I’m going back willingly. Not as a captive, but as a woman ready to burn the whole mountain down if that’s what it takes to bring him home.
Ian sits in the passenger seat, silent and still in a way that terrifies me more than any of his usual sharp humor ever could. No sarcasm. No dry jokes to cut the tension. Just this heavy, deliberate quiet, like he’s already stepped into whatever version of himself this rescue will demand.
His hands rest on his thighs, fingers occasionally flexing like he’s testing how steady they still are. I want to reach for him, to thank him for not pretending this is anything less than devastating, but I’m afraid if I touch him, the fragile wall I’ve built around my panic will shatter.
We didn’t have a long discussion after Andrei’s call confirmed what we already felt in our bones.
Valeria has him. She’s had him for weeks.
The words landed like a death sentence, and in the silence that followed, Ian and I simply looked at each other across the kitchen table.
No weighing odds. No calculating survival percentages. Just one brutal, shared understanding.
Reth needs us. So, we go. And whatever we drag out of that house might not be the man we left behind in Greece.
The thought sits like ice in my stomach.
I close my eyes, fighting the wave of terror that threatens to pull me under.
What if he’s broken beyond repair? What if the Reth who comes back is only a ghost of the man who held me in Paris, who looked at me like I was the only light he’d ever been allowed to touch?
I don’t care.
I’ll take whatever’s left of him.
I’ll love the pieces. I’ll hold the sharp edges. I’ll bleed with him until he remembers who he is.
Because he’s mine.
The house comes into view through the trees, and my breath catches hard in my throat.
It looks exactly the same. Not a single crack in the stone. Every window intact. The front door solid and dark, waiting like it never witnessed blood and screams and the moment my entire world fractured.
The sight of it hits me harder than I expected—a sharp, stunning ache that lodges itself right behind my ribs.
This place should be ruined. It was ruined.
And yet here it stands, perfect and untouched, as if the massacre never happened.
As if Reth had simply paused time and put everything back the way it was before he sent us away.
The car rolls to a stop. I don’t move. I can’t.
“The windows,” I whisper, voice cracking.
Ian glances over from the front seat. His jaw tightens as his eyes find the house. Something raw flickers across his face before he locks it down. “Yeah.”
“Everything’s… fixed.”
Ian exhales slowly. “Reth had it sorted. Within a week, apparently.”
A week.
Between everything going on, he put it back together. Like a promise. Like a message left behind in case we ever made it back.
Tears burn my eyes. I bite them back viciously as I push the car door open and step out onto the gravel.
The mountain air is cold and crisp, carrying the scent of pine and stone and memories that hurt to breathe in. I stare at the house, at the place where I chose him, where I chose us, and the absence of him beside me feels like a living wound.
Ian opens the front door. I follow. My hands find the frame on either side, and I just stand there breathing it in, the way you breathe in something you thought you'd lost, slowly, deliberately, trying to take in enough to store somewhere safe.
The last time I stood right here, I had an impossible choice in front of me – run, or stay with the dangerous, beautiful monster who had stolen my heart and refused to give it back.
I stayed.
I stayed, and I have never regretted it for a single second.
Because he’s worth every scar. Every tear. Every risk. And I will tear this continent apart with my bare hands if that’s what it takes to bring him home.
"You okay?" Ian says from somewhere.
"Give me a minute."
He gives me a minute, and my throat does something complicated.
I step inside, and it’s exactly as I remember it. The floor, the light, the quality of silence this house keeps—engineered, weighted, the kind that doesn't occur naturally but that you stop noticing after a while. I stood in this hallway terrified, furious, cataloguing exits that didn't exist.
“You don’t win this by fighting me, Sophia.”
Words that meant something then but mean something entirely different now. It was never about fighting for survival. It was about fighting to not fall for him as deeply as I did.
I hear Ian and Andrei talking somewhere deeper in the house—low voices, clipped words, the quiet rhythm of strategy and violence. Planning. Preparing. Deciding how far they’re willing to go to bring him home.
I wipe the tears from my cheeks with the back of my hand and force myself to move through the house. Everything about it is pure nostalgia wrapped in razor wire.
Every corner, every hallway, every piece of furniture hits me like a memory I can’t outrun. The faint scent of cedar and smoke that still lingers in the air, the ghost of him everywhere I look.
The kitchen when he grabbed the knife, not feeling the cut, not caring that he was bleeding.
The living room floor where I slept, where he whispered, “This is not what I wanted.” I didn’t know what he meant by that. Now I do. He never meant to hurt me. Never meant for me to get caught up in his chaos. But here I am, caught up his chaos and unable to imagine my world without it.
I climb the stairs slowly, fingers trailing along the banister, each step pulling me deeper into the past. The house is too quiet. Too still. Like it’s holding its breath, waiting for its creator.
And then I stop, staring at the open door at the end of the hallway.
My heart stutters then fractures as I still in the threshold—autumn on one half of the ceiling, spring on the other, the two seasons meeting in the center without blending, two things that should never share a room sharing one.
For a long moment, I’m frozen. I can almost see him standing by the window. Almost feel the way the air would shift when he stepped close, the way his voice would drop when he said my name like a prayer and a warning all at once.
“I’ve been breathing you, Sophia Sinclair.”
A slow, aching split starts in my chest and spreads outward until every breath hurts.
It’s everywhere, the longing for him, the need for him to be okay, to come back to me so we can watch more sunrises and sunsets together in this room.
The view through the window hits me the way it always has as I step inside. The mountain. The sky. The sheer scale of a landscape that makes everything human feel appropriately small.
That's what breaks me open. Not the memory of standing here the first time.
Not the bench, the murals, the muffins, any of it.
Just the view. Still there. Still doing what it always did, enormous and unhurried and completely unmoved by everything that has happened since the last time I stood in front of it.
My eyes sting. I don't fight it.
I let it in.
All of it.
Everything I’ve been holding at a careful, functional distance for weeks.
The bench by the moat in Joetsu, where I sat every morning feeding swans and counting days like rosary beads.
The flowers that never came. Apple cinnamon muffins baking at midnight because I needed something—anything—that still felt like him.
Ian’s kiss. The desperate press of his mouth against mine that felt so good and so terribly wrong at the same time.
The way he pressed his forehead against mine afterward.
And then his vow. The one he made after confessing he had fallen for me.
“I’m going to bring him back to you, Crazy. I fucking swear it.”
The memory slices deep. Ian—steady, sarcastic, unbreakable Ian—had looked me in the eyes and laid his heart at my feet, knowing I belonged to someone else.
Knowing I would always belong to Reth. And still he made that promise.
A sacrifice. A vow to drag the man I love back to me even if it destroyed whatever chance he might have had.
Tears spill hot down my cheeks. My shoulders shake with silent sobs as I curl tighter on the window bench, staring out at the indifferent mountain.
How cruel is love, that the two men who have torn my heart in opposite directions are both willing to bleed for me?
One lost in the dark, the other standing ready to walk into it to bring him home.
And here I am—caught between them, loving one with every shattered piece of me while the other offers his own heart as collateral.
“I can't fix this. I can't make it fair,” I whisper brokenly to the empty room. “But I need you both. Please… just come back to me, Nazareth. Let Ian bring you home. I can’t lose either of you.”
The mountain gives no answer. Only the quiet weight of two men’s devotion pressing down on my chest until it feels like it might cave in completely.
The mountain doesn't move. The light does, slowly, the way it always does in the late afternoon, shifting across the floor in long gold bars that travel toward the window and disappear.
Eventually, I hear Ian in the doorway, then he sits down beside me.
We look at the mountain together.
"This house," I start. I don't know how to finish it.
I try again. "The first time I came here, I was blindfolded.
I thought I was going to die. And then the blindfold came off, and I stood in a bedroom with glass walls and a mountain outside and I thought—" I stop.
"I thought it looked like something I'd imagined. "
"It was," Ian says quietly. "He built it for you."
I turn to face him fully. He’s watching me with that same heavy stillness he’s carried since Japan. His eyes are tired, but there’s something else in them now—something deeper, more resigned.
"Do you trust him?"
Ian’s jaw tightens. “Nope.”
"Then why—"
"Do we have a choice?" He pulls a hand down his face, leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "He has inside knowledge. Security rotations. Blind spots. The people she owns and the people she rents. We don't have any of that." A beat. "So. Do I trust him? No. Do I need what he knows? Yes."
I look back out at the mountain, the vast, uncaring stretch of it. "He’s going to want something in return."
"Everyone wants something," Ian says, then reaches for my hand, squeezing it. “And I don’t care what it is, I’ll give it to him if it means we get Reth out of there.”
The quiet conviction in his voice breaks something open in my chest, and I stare down at our joined hands, at the way his thumb brushes slowly over my knuckles—a small, unconscious comfort he probably doesn’t even realize he’s giving.
I open my mouth to speak when he cuts me off.
"Don't.”
"I wasn't going to say anything."
"Yeah, you were." A beat. "And I'd rather you didn't. Because then I'd have to say something back, and I'm not built for that conversation right now."
I look at the side of his face. At the tired lines of it, the careful set of his mouth, the specific quality of a man who has made peace with something and is living inside that peace without complaint.
"Ian."
"Sophia."
"Look at me."
He does. Slowly. And what's in his eyes when he does—God.
It's not longing, exactly. It's something quieter than that.
Something that has already been through longing and come out the other side into something more like clarity.
The look of a man who knows exactly what he feels and exactly what he's going to do about it.
Nothing.
Because he knows I belong to someone else, and nothing in this world will change that.
Yes, I feel something for him. There’s no use in denying what’s true. And maybe… "In another life," I start.
“Don't do that either.” He squeezes my hand again. “Because another life means this one isn't enough, and this one has him in it. And that's actually the point, Crazy. That's the whole point."
The words land quietly and stay.
"There is no version of this where I get what I want. And I’m okay with that.
Because Reth is my brother, not by blood, but by everything else, and I don’t want it any other way, even in a different lifetime.
” His thumb stills on my knuckles. "And you are not a contest. You are not a prize. You are everything.” Then looks at me. “But you are his.”
I don't have words for that. I don't think words are what it needs.
"So whatever this is," he says, quieter now, looking down at our joined hands, "whatever it is that happened in Japan and in that kitchen and on that step in the dark—it lives exactly there. In the dark. And we leave it there, and we go get him, and that's the end of it."
A tear rolls down my cheek, and I catch it before it falls, nodding silently in agreement while the mountain holds still outside the window.
I turn my hand over in his and squeeze once.
He squeezes back.
Neither of us says anything else. We don’t need to. Because the only thing that matters to both of us, the most important thing, is him. And getting him back.
Ian’s phone vibrates, and he lets go of my hand before swiping the screen. “He’s here.”
My heart beats faster. “I don’t trust him,” I say. “But I do trust you.” Then I lean in, giving him a gentle kiss on the cheek. “Bring Nazareth back to us.”