2. Sophia
SOPHIA
Three weeks. Twenty-one days of waking up in a country that isn't mine, in a bed that isn't mine, reaching across cold sheets for a man who isn't there.
Some mornings, the emotional ache comes first—raw, hollow, a quiet devastation that settles behind my ribs like a bruise that never fades.
I miss the weight of his silence in the room, the way he watched me like I was the only thing worth seeing in a world that had tried to break him.
I miss the rare, devastating softness he showed only to me, the way his fingers would trace my back like he was memorizing scripture.
But then the missing shifts, deepens, turns carnal. It sinks lower, curling hot and insistent between my thighs, because my body doesn’t understand absence the way my heart does. It only remembers what it felt like to be owned by him.
The absence is a living thing now. It curls against my spine when I wake, heavy and possessive, whispering that the space beside me should be filled with the solid heat of Reth’s body, the low rumble of his breath against my neck, the hands that would drag me closer like I belonged there.
I still feel the ghost of him between my thighs some mornings—the delicious ache he left behind in Paris, the way he stretched me open and claimed every inch like he was trying to imprint himself inside me forever.
My body remembers. And everything I am…misses. Longs. Yearns.
The house is small and unremarkable from the street—a two-bedroom rental in a quiet residential pocket of Joetsu City, the kind of place that doesn’t register. A wooden gate, a narrow garden, rooms that smell like tatami and old cedar.
Ian chose it the way Ian chooses everything: quickly, practically, with his eyes on the exits.
Private entrance. No shared walls with strangers.
A kitchen that belongs only to us. It’s nothing like the mountain house, nothing like Paris, and it has become, in the way places do when you stay in them long enough against your will, completely familiar.
I know which floorboard announces itself outside the bathroom. I know the particular quality of light through the kitchen window at six in the morning—low and amber, coming in at an angle that catches the steam off the kettle and turns it gold.
I know all of it.
I don’t want to know any of it.
I want to know the weight of Reth’s body pinning me to the mattress in Paris, the way his winter-blue eyes went black when he was buried inside me, the scar on his face pulling tight as he came with my name on his lips.
I want his apartment. His voice through a closed door.
The specific way he’d settle onto the bed beside me in the dark and pull me into his chest like I was the only thing anchoring him to this world.
That’s all I want. That’s all I need.
Takada Castle is a ten-minute walk. I’ve made it every morning for twenty-one days.
The path is muscle memory now. The moat, the stone, the grounds still and unhurried before the first visitors arrive.
I have a bench—third from the left along the eastern walk, slightly uneven, rocks when you shift your weight—and I sit on it every morning with my instant coffee going cold in my hands.
I watch the water and I think about the fact that there have been no flowers.
In Paris, they came every six days without fail.
Peonies in rotating colors, each delivery its own quiet message—I’m alive, I’m thinking of you, hold on.
The ritual of them kept me functional across months of absence.
The way I’d wake up and find them by the door, and feel the knot in my chest loosen, just slightly, just enough to breathe.
And I know Japan is different.
A different country, a different city, a logistical challenge even for a man who can source untraceable apartments and private jets.
I know the silence of the flowers here doesn’t mean what the silence of the flowers meant in Paris.
I know this. I tell myself this every morning on the bench while the water does its still, indifferent thing, and mostly I believe it.
On the mornings I don’t, I sit a little longer and make myself believe it before I walk back.
But the dread is thicker now. It creeps in like ink in water—images I can’t stop.
Reth’s face painted white and black, the karambit in his hand, Valeria watching him with that sick hunger while he worked on someone strapped to a chair.
I imagine her hands on him. Her voice in his ear. The basement. The things she might be doing to remind him who owns him. My stomach twists every time. The not-knowing is its own violence.
Ian is already in the kitchen when I come through the gate. I can see him through the window before he sees me—standing at the counter with his coffee, staring at nothing, jaw set in the particular way it gets when he’s been awake for a while and has run out of useful things to do with the time.
He looks, in those unguarded seconds, like a man sitting with something heavy in his hands and trying to figure out where to put it down.
Then he hears the gate latch, and his face rearranges.
By the time I slide the door open, he’s reaching for the kettle with the easy manner of a man with nothing on his mind.
I watch him do it and feel something pull tight in my chest. Not just worry. Something softer and sadder than that—gratitude and grief at once for this man who has pretended to be fine for three weeks because he decided a long time ago that his fear is less important than mine.
“Ah.” He doesn’t look up. “The wanderer returns. How’s the castle? Still standing?”
“Still standing.”
“The swans?”
“The aggressive one took someone’s entire breakfast.”
“Absolute legend.” He pushes a cup across the counter. “I’ve been thinking. You’ve been doing this castle walk every morning for three weeks, and I’ve been letting you go alone, which means I’ve been missing out on what is clearly the most compelling wildlife drama in Niigata Prefecture.”
I sit at the kitchen table. Wrap both hands around the cup. Look at him. “Ian.”
“I’m serious. Tomorrow, I’m coming. I want to see this swan. I want to look him in the eye.”
“Ian.”
“I feel like we’d understand each other.”
“Ian.”
He finally looks at me. The performance is good—the easy set of his shoulders, the slight amusement at the corner of his mouth—but I’ve been watching it for three weeks, and I know every seam.
I know the precise angle at which his chin lifts when he’s deflecting.
I know the way his eyes land on me and then move away again just a half-second too fast when the thing he’s not saying is sitting too close to the surface.
“Eat something,” he says.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Sophia—”
“He said he’d be here, Ian. That was the plan, right?”
He nods.
“Then why isn’t he here?”
“He’s got a lot of shit to deal with, Sophia. It’s not like he can just walk away, get on a plane, and forget about the danger he’d put you in if his every step isn’t curated.”
“I know that. But… twenty-one days, Ian,” I say it quietly. Not accusatory. Just a fact I need to put somewhere outside my own chest. “Not a word. Not a single thing to prove he’s okay. Has he ever gone this long without contact?”
Ian leans back against the counter. Crosses his arms. The amusement fades, replaced by something more carefully neutral. “He’s gone longer.”
“How much longer?”
A beat. Just a beat, but it tells me everything. “Longer.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the answer I have.”
I look at him steadily. He looks back, and for a moment I see the thing underneath—just the edge of it, just enough—before he folds it back with the practiced ease of a man who has been folding it for weeks.
“He knows where we are,” Ian says. “He knows you’re here. That hasn’t changed.”
“And if he can’t contact us? If something happened and he’s not choosing the silence—”
“He’s choosing it.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know him.”
“Then tell me honestly. Does this feel like him choosing silence? Or does this feel like something else?”
The kitchen goes quiet. Outside, a cicada starts up and then stops, thinks better of it. The garden tap drips its thirty-second drip and goes still. Ian looks at the floor, and I watch his jaw work, and I wait, because I have learned how to wait. I have had twenty-one days of practice.
“He’s dealt with worse,” he says. To the floor, not to me.
“That’s what you said last week.”
“Because it’s still true.”
“Ian—”
“What do you want me to say?” He looks up, and the neutrality has cracked just slightly at the edges—not broken, but stressed, the way a wall looks right before it cracks.
There’s something in his eyes that he’s been keeping carefully out of them for weeks, and it’s right there now, just barely.
“That I’m worried? Fine. Yes. I’m worried.
I’ve been worried since day eight. But worried and panicking are two different things, and one of them is useful and one of them isn’t, so I’m choosing worried, and I’m choosing to trust the protocol, because that’s what he asked me to do, and I—” He stops.
His throat moves. “That’s what he asked me to do. ”
The way he says it—that small break before the repeat, the way it comes out like something he’s been gripping very tightly for a very long time—lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays there.
“The protocol,” I say softly. “He set the protocol to protect me. Not to protect himself. If something has happened to him, Ian, we are sitting in a house in Japan, and he’s—”
“We don’t know that something has happened.”