27. Reth
RETH
I’ve been in this room for twenty minutes. Back against the stone wall, arms crossed, the particular stillness I learned a long time ago—the kind that looks like patience but is actually something colder. Something that’s already decided how this ends.
Rowan kept his word. The address, the time, the route—everything delivered perfectly.
Between burying myself inside Sophia, whispering every violent promise against her skin while I fucked her slow and deep, and reading the confirmation on that single sheet of paper, I’ve imagined a hundred different ways I’d do this.
A hundred different ways I’d carve the years she stole from me out of her flesh.
I never let myself fully believe this day would come.
I hoped the way you hope for things you’ve stopped expecting.
The room is almost bare. Just the gilded chair in the center, brought in specifically so the first thing she sees when they drag her through that door is a throne that no longer belongs to her.
I hear them before I see them. Footsteps in the corridor—multiple, heavy, the specific cadence of people managing someone who isn't cooperating but has decided that not cooperating is beneath her.
That tracks. Valeria doesn't struggle with things she can't win.
She waits. She calculates. She finds the angle.
The door opens.
Two of Rowan's men. And between them, her.
What happens in my chest when I see her isn’t rage.
I've carried rage for years, and I know its texture, its temperature, the way it sits in the sternum and wants out.
This isn't that. This is quieter than rage and older than rage and in some ways more frightening than rage, because rage wants to move, and this just—settles. Like a key finding a lock. Like something that’s been suspended for years finally, finally touching ground.
I look at the woman who destroyed me, and the weight of everything she took from me lands somewhere below the ribs.
And underneath it, underneath all of it, one thing so clear and clean it doesn't need examination… she is never leaving this room.
Valeria’s composed as they bring her in.
Of course, she is—she's been composed through things that would have broken most people before they understood what was happening.
The coat is gone, replaced with something simpler, and her hair isn't quite perfect the way it always is.
Those two details alone tell me more about what the last few days have cost her than anything she'll ever say out loud.
They put her in the chair.
She doesn't resist as they bind her wrists to the arms, her ankles to the legs.
She just sits there with that expression—the one I've seen across multiple briefings and dinners and murders, the one that says I am still the most intelligent person in this room and we both know it—and looks straight ahead.
She doesn't see me at first.
That's intentional. I've positioned myself in the corner where the light doesn't reach, arms crossed, completely still, and I watch her take inventory of the room—systematic, unhurried, cataloguing exits and variables and angles of control with the brisk, almost bored efficiency of a woman who has spent her entire life arriving places she already owns.
She finds the single iron-framed chair. The metal case on top. And then she finds me.
It's there for less than a second. A flicker—just a flicker—behind those dark eyes.
Something that in a different woman I'd call fear, but in Valeria I call it the recalibration of someone who has just registered a variable they weren't fully prepared for.
Then it's gone, locked down behind the composure so fast I would have missed it if I weren't looking for exactly that.
I step out of the shadows into the light.
"Nazareth." Warm. Almost fond. The frequency she reserves for moments when she's decided warmth is the most efficient tool available. "I wondered when you'd step out of the corner."
I don't answer.
"I want you to know," she continues, settling back slightly in the chair with the ease of a woman pretending the restraints at her wrists are a choice she's made rather than a fact imposed on her, "that I don't hold any of this against you.
What you're feeling right now—the anger, the need for this—I understand it.
I've always understood you better than anyone.
" A beat, perfectly timed. "That's never going to change. "
I pull the chair from against the wall. Set it directly in front of her. Sit.
She watches me open the case. Something moves through her expression—brief, controlled, like she’s clocking a move on a board she still believes she's winning.
“You’re feeling theatrical today, I see.”
I uncap the white.
"You're hurt," she says, watching my hands. "That's understandable. What Rowan did—"
White across the forehead. The cheekbones. The precise geometric lines I've made a thousand times.
"—is a betrayal, and you should know that I—"
The black. The edges. The sharpening.
"Nazareth." Her voice drops slightly, the warmth replaced by something more direct. "I don’t appreciate being ignored."
I know. That's the point. I'm listening to every word, cataloguing the sequence—warmth first, then understanding, then Rowan as shared grievance, then the voice drop when warmth doesn’t work.
I know her toolkit the way I know my own hands.
I built the inventory of it across years of watching her work rooms and people and situations with the patient, surgical precision of someone who has never once needed to raise her voice to get what she wanted.
I know exactly what she's doing.
I also know it's going to take more than silence to break her.
Valeria isn't a man in a room who doesn't know what's coming.
She's been preparing for some version of this since the moment they brought her through that door.
She's been building her defenses the whole drive here, constructing the architecture of how she'll manage this the way she constructs everything—calmly, systematically, with the absolute certainty that if she can just find the right frequency she can reach me.
But not tonight. I’m un-fucking-reachable to her.
Without taking my eyes off her, I drag the black paint along my scar, lean into it, make it part of the mask rather than a flaw beneath it.
Every stroke is methodical. Ritualistic. I know exactly what this does to her. She used to watch me prepare like this before I worked for her—hungry, proprietary, aroused by the monster she created. Now she gets to sit in the chair and feel what it’s like when that monster has come home to roost.
"You're not going to speak to me at all," she says. Flat now. Reassessing. "That's the strategy."
I cap the paint.
She holds my gaze with everything she has, all the composure, all the control of a woman who has been the most powerful presence in every room she's entered for fucking years.
Me? I’m looking back at her the way I look at things I'm about to take apart.
I shift the heavy iron chair across the concrete floor, closer to her. The screeching of metal against stone fills the room like a threat—raw, ugly, endless. I’m close enough that she can smell the paint on me. Close enough that she can see the black already drying in the grooves of my scar.
Valeria snarls. “I’m not one of your helpless targets. You won’t break me that easily.”
I dip my fingers into the white. She tries to jerk backward, chains rattling as she twists in the seat, but there’s nowhere to go.
Her lips peel back from her teeth in a vicious, animal sound—half fury, half fear. She yanks at the restraints hard enough that the gilded arms creak, eyes wild beneath the first streaks of white I haven’t even applied yet.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
I simply lean in closer and smear it across her cheekbone. Skin on skin. Slow. Deliberate. She snaps her head to the side, trying to escape my touch, but I grip her jaw with my other hand, squeezing so hard her lips pucker as I hold her still.
I drag my fingertips down the other cheek, coating her flawless skin, then scoop more black and smear it thick around her eyes. She thrashes harder, a snarl ripping out of her as the paint ruins her face, but the chains keep her exactly where I want her.
I paint over her lips last, forcing the black into every fine line, turning that once-elegant mouth into a smeared, monstrous gash.
When I finally sit back, we are mirror images. Painted. Ruined. Matched.
I look at her in silence. Let her feel exactly what it’s like to wear the face of the thing she created. The silence stretches so long it becomes a living thing—thick, suffocating, pressing against every corner.
She tries to hold my gaze. Of course she does. She’s always been good at pretending she’s still in control. But I see the cracks. The way her fingers twitch against the arms of the chair. The way her throat works as she swallows again and again, trying not to break first.
I let minutes bleed by.
She breaks first.
“You think this changes anything?” Her voice is hoarse, but she forces that old, silky venom back into it. “You think painting me like some cheap imitation makes you free? You’re still mine, Nazareth.”
I lean my head to the side, waiting for it. Waiting for those two words she fucking loves to say. I know it’s coming.
“You think you and your little therapist will ever find peace?” She laughs, and it’s evil as fuck.
“You will never find peace, Nazareth. Not without me. Because inside that broken mind of yours, you’ll always be my,” she leans forward as much as the chains allow, painted lips curling into a sneer, “pretty boy.”
And there it is.
The iron chair scrapes back with a screech as I stand. My hand moves to the karambit at my thigh, and the moment my fingers close around the handle, something ancient and hungry clicks into place.