25. Reth #2
He’s standing with his arms crossed, weight shifted to his back foot—the exact posture of a man who has already decided where he stands and isn’t fucking moving.
He isn’t looking at Rowan. He isn’t quite looking at me either.
His eyes are fixed on some point just past my shoulder, jaw locked tight, that distant, heavy stare I’ve seen on him across eleven years and every impossible situation we’ve survived together.
I know that look. I’ve learned to read the precise weight of it.
This isn’t Ian managing information for tactical reasons. This isn’t Ian being cagey because the timing isn’t right. This is Ian having already paid something. And from the look on his face, the price was steep.
Something cold moves through my chest. "What’s the deal, Ian?”
"Not today, Reth."
“What’s the fucking deal?”
He meets my eyes, and what's in his is enough to make me stop—the absolute certainty of a man who has made a choice and is living inside it.
"Deal with what's on the table first."
“Listen to your friend, Reth.” Rowan reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket. Sets a single folded piece of paper on the table between us. Smoothly. Without drama. The way you set down something you've been carrying for a long time and are finally ready to put down.
I don't touch it yet, eyes glued on Ian, whose expression is stone.
“I’ll let Ian here tell you his part of the deal when he’s ready, but here’s mine.” He slides the paper toward me with two fingers. “That is my wife handed to you…on a silver. Fucking. Platter.”
I remain perfectly still.
No sudden movement. No outburst. Just the slow, methodical churn of my mind turning over every variable, every possible angle, every hidden blade this offer might carry. My gaze drops to the folded paper for only a second before returning to Rowan.
I don’t move. I count instead. The shallow rise of Rowan’s chest. The white of Ian’s knuckle where his hand grips his own forearm.
The number of steps—four, maybe five—between me and the man whose voice used to make me wet myself as a child going through excruciating training, being built into what I am today, who is now sitting in my house, in my chair, in my light, with his legs crossed like he’s waiting on a fucking train.
My voice, when it finally comes, is low and flat. Controlled. “Why?”
Rowan lifts a brow. “Your friend and I made a deal.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Then what are you referring to?”
“Brussels.” I take a step closer. “You planned it. Me being there at the same time as Samuel. And Paris. You took your cunt of a wife off the fucking radar so I could have a week. And then you offer to help get me out of the hell-hole she put me in.” My jaw clenches. “Why?”
There’s a moment of perfect silence.
Rowan watches me with the same unblinking intensity I use on targets—cataloging every micro-expression, every shift in my posture, every flicker of rage I can’t quite bury. He reads me like he’s flipping through pages he’s memorized long ago.
He tilts his head slightly, the gesture almost clinical.
“Because despite what you might think, I care for you like a son.”
“Bullshit.”
"You think Samuel's the kind of son I wanted?
" Rowan's voice stays even, but something underneath it shifts.
"A boy who learned to wear suits before he learned to stand up straight.
Who has never once in his life been tested and come through it changed.
" His eyes hold mine. "I watched you survive things that would have broken most men before you were old enough to shave. I watched you become something extraordinary under circumstances that were never fair and never kind.”
“Great. I have a fan,” I deadpan.
Rowan stands, straightens his navy suit jacket. “I stopped it.” His jaw clenches, a tiny-tell he’s losing composure. “I stopped the abuse. After I found you in that room with your face cut open, I stopped it.”
“It stopped because Mary found out.”
Ian stiffens beside me, and I hear him swear under his breath. I haven’t told anyone about that part. The part where my own sister betrayed me, sold me out for Egyptian cotton sheets and fucking fairy lights.
“Mary found out,” I continue. “So you had to stop it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, son.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You think I’d let a little girl tell me what to do? Dictate my next move? I stopped what Valeria was doing to you because—”
"Because you needed him broken," Ian chimes in.
The room goes very still.
Rowan looks at Ian. Ian looks back at him with the flat, unimpressed steadiness. "You needed him broken so you could build the weapon," Ian continues. "And when the teenage boy broke, you swept in like a knight in shining fucking armor."
Rowan stares at Ian for a long moment. The kind of look that takes a full inventory and reveals nothing. Then he looks back at me.
"Mary was always the leash," he says. "But I knew it was only a matter of time before that blew up in Valeria's face.
Before the truth came out." He moves to the floor-to-ceiling windows, unhurried, hands clasped behind his back, looking out into the pitch black of the mountain night. "Then Sophia came along."
Nobody speaks.