RETH
I’m finally able to take a shower now that the shaking has mostly stopped.
What’s left when it surfaces is pieces. Not memory in any order I trust—just fragments, sharp at the edges and unanchored from each other, like photographs spilled out of a box with no chronology to put them back in. Blood-slick snapshots from a hell I didn’t think I’d survive.
The driveway. Ian’s shoulder under my arm, Andrei on the other side, their grips iron because they knew I’d bolt if the drugs let my legs work.
Then her—arms around me, soft and desperate and real, and for one second something in my chest unclenched so completely I thought it might be the drugs lying to me again.
I don’t know if that’s real. I want it to be real so badly that wanting it makes me distrust it more. A man like me doesn’t get soft landings. He gets bullets and blades and the wet sound of throats opening under his karambit.
I get out of the shower, grab a towel, cold water still running down my back. The mirror’s fogged. Good. I don’t need to see the face looking back.
My right hand finds my left arm without thinking. The bruises are ugly—deep purple, yellow at the edges, puncture sites still tender. Track marks.
I trace them slowly, thumb pressing into the worst one near the crook of my elbow until the dull ache sharpens.
These are the places the needle went in when the craving won.
When I was too weak to stop it. Assassin’s veins.
Supposed to be clean. Supposed to be disciplined. Now they look like any other junkie’s.
I press harder. The pain is honest. I can work with pain. It’s the other shit—the soft shit—that fucks me.
It feels good to pull on a clean set of clothes, sweatpants and tee.
I think it’s been a while since I last vomited.
I think. Throwing up until there was nothing left was the worst. Stomach heaving so hard I tasted copper and bile and the ghost of every chemical that got pumped into me.
Retching on my knees like a dog, sweat pouring off me in sheets, muscles seizing until I thought my spine would snap.
The craving, it’s still humming low at the base of my skull. Quieter now but not gone. Just waiting for a crack. Still crawling under my skin. Insects with too many legs moving in lines up my arms.
Difference is now I know they’re not really there, but I still look down at my own forearms to confirm it, fisting my hands, feeling my fingers. And now staring at the compass inked into my skin.
North.
I know where it is now. I know where it points to.
Her name. Sophia—
Sophia Sinclair.
I can grab on to it now. Her name. Wrap myself around it, like a drowning man with his face in the gutter and only one thing to hang on to.
She’s real. I know she is. I also know the yelling was real.
My own voice tearing something in my throat with the force of it.
Get out. Get away from me. Her face—not understanding, or understanding too well, I can’t tell which is worse.
Those green eyes wide, the same ones that looked at me like I was worth saving, now reflecting the monster I’ve always been.
I remember why.
Not all of it. Just enough. She got close—she was always going to get close, that’s what she does, she doesn’t know how to stay away from something that’s hurting—and I looked at her, and for one fractured second she wasn’t standing there in one of my shirts with flour on her arm.
She was bleeding. Red at the mouth, spreading dark through white cotton, and my hands—
The room tilts, and I grab the edge of the bathroom sink. My legs hold, mostly. Weak, but the weapon in me catalogs the weakness, files it, prepares contingencies even now.
I look up, the fogged up mirror becoming clear. It’s like a lightning strike, a tear through reality, and for a split second I see Mary in the reflection. Empty eyes, gaping throat, and I press my eyes closed.
I know I didn’t kill her. Ian told me he saw the video footage, that it was Valeria. Deep down I knew, but my mind was so fucked—still is—but down there, the mind games she played, Samuel’s accusation, it all got wrapped up so tight in the rot and turned every memory wrong.
But knowing the truth doesn’t erase the things I’ve seen. The things my mind showed me. It’s still there. Standing in the dark corner. Watching me. And I don’t think it’ll ever leave.
I’m barefoot, walking back into the bedroom. This room. This house. It still feels off. Too clean. Too safe. After that cell—concrete, chains, the constant stink of my own piss and fear—this place feels like a lie I’m waiting for someone to rip away.
The fabric of my shirt scrapes the back of my neck, reminding me I’m back in a body that belongs to me again. Sort of. The bruises on my arm say different. The track marks say different. Everything still feels borrowed.
When I look at the bedroom door, flashes hit me hard.
Ian’s face. My fist connecting. The crack of bone.
Craving had me twisted up so bad I was lunging for the hallway like a cornered dog, screaming at him to get the fuck out of the way, that I needed out, needed something, anything to make it stop.
He wouldn’t move. Just took the hit, absorbed it, kept talking me down while I swung again.
Guilt twists sharp in my gut now, ugly and real, but I shake it off—or at least try to.
Locked.
Right. I asked for that.
“Reth?”
My heart stutters, a sharp kick against my ribs.
Sophia.
Her voice hits different—soft, worried, real in a way that cuts straight through the fog still clinging to my head. It makes my chest tighten and my gut drop at the same time.
“Are you okay?”
Fuck. Part of me wants to rip the door open and pull her against me until I can’t tell where I end and she begins. The smarter part locks up, because hearing her on the other side of this wood reminds me exactly how dangerous I am right now.
I want her here. I’m fucking terrified of what I might do if she gets too close.
The craving’s quieter, but it’s still there, whispering that one hit would make everything easier, and the last thing I need is her seeing me like this.
Weak. Fucked up. Capable of putting hands on her the way I put them on Ian.
“Reth…please.”
The plea in her voice guts me.
I don’t answer right away. I stand there with my head against the door and my eyes closed, and I think about what’s on the other side of this door that I want so badly it physically hurts and that I’m also, simultaneously, more afraid of than anything Valeria ever did to me in that cell.
Because I know she’s real now. The fragments are starting to line up enough to tell me that much—the arms in the driveway, the voice through the door, the smell of her that doesn’t belong to anyone else. My Cherry-red. The only woman who ever made the killer want to be a man.
My true North.
But I can still see the other version. The one with blood on her mouth. The one I held the karambit over. I know it didn’t happen. Knowing that doesn’t make my body believe it. The weapon doesn’t trust hope. He trusts patterns. And the pattern with me is ruin.
“Reth.” Softer this time. “Can I come in?”
I don’t say yes.
I don’t say no either.
I just stand there with my forehead against the door, heart hammering like a war drum in my chest, every instinct I’ve honed through years of blood and shadows screaming at me to keep her safe from the piece of shit on this side of the wood.
After a moment, I hear the lock turn from her side, and I step back. The door starts to open, slowly, like she’s giving me every possible second to stop her if I want to.
I don’t stop her.
My hands curl into fists at my sides, nails digging into palms that have ended more lives than I can count.
The assassin in me is already mapping the room, the exits, how fast I could drop her if the wrong memory takes over.
But the rest of me—the fucked-up, starving, scared-shitless part that loves her with every broken piece I’ve got—just stands there and lets the only good thing I’ve ever had walk straight into the dark with me.
The second I see her, I suck in a breath.
She’s wearing a black shirt, not white. And there’s no blood.
Just her, standing in the doorway like she’s been waiting a lifetime, eyes red-rimmed and desperate, hair a mess like she’s run her hands through it a hundred times, and she’s never looked more beautiful.
“Hi.” She looks at me, her face doing that thing—softens and breaks at the same time, like seeing me hurts and heals her in the same breath.
“Hi.” I loosen my fist, love and guilt slamming together so hard I can’t tell which is which.
Part of me wants to shove her back out the door before I even think of hurting her.
The rest of me—the part that’s been starving for her—wants to drop to my knees and let her wrap those arms around me until the ache stops for good.
She takes one step forward then stops, studies me like she’s waiting for a reaction.
I don’t move. Can’t. But my eyes won’t leave her. She’s real. Alive. Looking at me like I’m still hers even when I feel like the worst kind of monster.
I swallow hard, throat tight. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“This is exactly where I should be.” Another step, close enough now that I can smell her—vanilla and orange peel and that faint trace of flour from the kitchen that says she’s been trying to hold herself together the only way she knows how. “I’m not scared of you, Reth.”
“You should be fucking terrified.”
She doesn’t flinch. Just looks at me with those green eyes that have always seen too much. “I will never be scared of you.”
I inch back, my need for her dangerously close to snapping the last thread of control I have left, every muscle locked tight so I don’t grab her and take what I want like the animal who doesn’t deserve it.
“It’s ugly, Cherry-red.”
“And I want all of it. The monster, the man, the broken parts you think I can’t handle. Let me have them.”
Her hand lifts, slow, like she’s approaching a wounded animal that might bite.
I don’t stop her. When her fingers brush my arm, light and careful over the bruises, something in my chest cracks wide open. I want to pull away. I want to pull her closer. I want to be the man she thinks I am instead of the one I actually am.
Her touch burns in the best way, soft against the mess of my skin, and it’s too much. Too good. My hand shoots up on instinct, wrapping around her wrist—not hard, but firm enough to feel her pulse hammering under my fingers.
“You keep touching me like that and I won’t—”
“Don’t push me away.” She’s so close, her breath warm on my neck. “I can handle your ugly, Nazareth.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“But I want to because that’s what love is. It’s not what we do when things are pretty. Love is what we do when they’re not.”
Fuck. Guilt crashes over me, thick and choking.
Valeria’s hands on me in that room, the way my body betrayed me, the sounds she made that still make me sick to remember.
And then Sophia—trying to help, trying to be there—and I screamed at her like she was the enemy, like she was the one who broke me.
I hate myself for it. For all of it.
I loosen my grip but don’t let go, thumb brushing her pulse like I need to remind myself she’s real and alive and not bleeding because of me.
“You don’t know.” My voice cracks. “The things I did—what she—”
“I don’t care. I don’t. Fucking care.” Her hand’s on my cheek, and I lose my words, sucking air through my teeth because she’s so warm, so soft, so fucking human and tender, and my insides can’t take that kind of kindness without buckling.
I kiss her.
It’s a mess of teeth and salt and desperation, nothing like pretty or gentle, mouths crashing together like we’ve both been held underwater and need air from each other to survive.
Her hands tangle in my shirt, and I don’t pull away.
I don’t want to. Because kissing her is the first real thing, the first true fucking thing I’ve felt in weeks.
It’s not broken or bloody or distorted. It’s perfect, and I sweep my tongue through her mouth, needing more of it.
Deepening the kiss like I’m trying to pour every broken piece of myself into her so she can see how much I don’t deserve this but how badly I need it anyway.
She tastes like salt and home and everything I thought I’d lost, and for the first time in—
Something crawls along the back of my neck. Sharp. Wrong. I shrug, wanting it gone. Kiss her harder. Crawling. Then shrug again. Tremors start in my right hand, and I let go, shaking it.
Sophia breaks the kiss. “Are you okay?”
It’s in my arm now, and I look down at my hand. The crawling spreads fast, like fingers dragging over my skin—long, possessive, the exact way she touched me when I was—
Fuck. I can taste her blood in my mouth. Her ear. It’s metallic and vile, teeth sinking into cartilage.
I jerk back, breath coming fast, the room tilting again. “I can’t—”
“Reth—”
“You need to leave.”
“No.”
“Please, Sophia.”
She doesn’t back away. “Don’t do this, Reth. Don’t push me—”
She’ll never forgive what you did.
“Fuck!” I press my palms over my ears, needing her fucking voice gone.
“Reth, you need to breathe through it.” Sophia’s voice. Firm, panicked at the edges. “Take a deep breath.”
She’s going to smell me on you.
“No.”
“Reth, whatever it is, it’s not real. Okay? You’re safe.”
I open my eyes, and Sophia’s there, watching me, and I don’t want her this close when her voice is inside my head.
“Please. Leave,” I beg, struggling to get air.
“No. I won’t leave you.”
“Jesus Christ. Goddammit!” I rush past her, straight into the bathroom, slam the door and lock it.
My back hits the wood and I slide down until my ass hits the cold tile, knees drawn up, head in my hands. Valeria’s laugh echoes in my skull, low and satisfied, the way it did when she watched me come apart against my will.
I can still feel her fingers, her breath, the way she praised me like a good dog while my body gave her what my mind screamed no to.
The guilt is worse than the crawling. Sophia’s out there, loving me, and I’m in here with the ghost of the woman who ruined me still riding my skin, smelling of sex and evil.
I don’t deserve her. I never did.
“Reth, please,” Sophia pleads on the other side of the door.
You’re going to hurt her, sweet boy.
I scream. “Leave me the fuck alone!”
And the craving detonates.