4. Reth
RETH
There’s a woman.
Blonde.
That’s what comes first, before her name, before her face resolves fully—just the color, gold and pale and warm, the specific shade of it in afternoon light coming through a Paris window.
I hold on to it. The image bobs and blurs at the edges, and I grip it the way you grip something in a current, knowing that if I let go I won't find it again, not today, maybe not ever.
The rest of me is rotting.
The stone floor is slick with old vomit and piss and whatever else has leaked out of me over the days that have blurred into one endless, stinking night.
My clothes are stiff with it. My hair is matted.
There’s a cut on my forehead from where I slammed my skull against the wall earlier, and the blood has dried in flaky trails down my face.
I can taste copper on my tongue. I don’t know if it’s from the cut or from biting the inside of my cheek raw.
"You smell like a sewer." Valeria's voice comes through the slot. Measured. Almost gentle, the way she is when she's decided on a particular approach.
I don't move.
I'm on my side on the floor, my cheek against the stone, and the stone is cold, and the cold is the most real thing currently available to me, so I stay with it. The smell is worse when I breathe through my mouth. Sour bile, old blood, and the chemical tang of whatever she’s been pumping into me.
My body has been betraying me for days, weeks, months—cramps, sweats, the shakes that start in my fingers and spread until I can’t hold my own head up.
"Nazareth." The slot widens slightly. "You've vomited on yourself. You're lying in it."
I know. I've known for—however long. Time doesn't behave correctly in here. It stretches and compresses without logic, hours vanishing, single minutes lasting geological ages.
I know about the vomit. I know about the other things too, the smells that have accumulated in this room over however many days, and I have filed all of it into the category of things that are true and cannot currently be changed, alongside Mary and the door and the crack in the ceiling.
"Let me come in." Her voice drops. Something performing tenderness moves into it. "Let me have someone bring warm water. I’ll bathe you. Help you get into clean clothes. Let me take care of—"
"Touch me," my voice comes out wrecked and slow, but the words are clear enough, "put one hand on me, Valeria.
Put one finger on me." I pause. Let the haze do its slow work for a moment. "I'll bite it off at the knuckle.” I let out an eerie laugh. “I think I’ll chew through it and spit it at your feet and then…” I raise a hand in the air like I’m making a profound statement.
“…then I'll use the bone to open my own wrist just so you have to watch me bleed out on this floor.
And there's not a fucking thing you can do about it. "
Silence from the slot.
"I'll pull your tongue out through your throat," I continue, conversationally.
"I'll take those pretty eyes out with my thumbs.
I've thought about it. I've had time to think about it in here.
I've thought about it in detail." I pause, a clear picture forming in my head—clearer than any picture’s been for a while. My hands covered in her blood. It ignites this rush in my bones, the thought of her suffering. "On second thought, do come in.” My gaze fixes on hers. “I’d love for you to put your hands on me. Please.”
A long moment stretches. Then, with the unruffled patience of someone who has been doing this for a very long time, "Fine."
She concedes it the way she concedes everything I actually mean—cleanly, without argument, filing it away for later.
"Then eat."
The tray is already on the floor. I don't remember it arriving. I don't remember the slot opening or the ceramic sound or anything between the last hit and now, which means time passed without me in it again.
The food is rice. Something beige alongside it. It smells like nothing, which is better than what the room smells like.
"You eat," she says, "and then you get what you need."
What you need.
The wanting is already building. It never fully leaves. It just ebbs and surges, and right now it's surging, pressing against the inside of my skin. Everything burns, like little coals scattered underneath my flesh.
I think about her.
Blonde. Green eyes.
I can see them now, the image steadying briefly. Green like something living, like the color of the world outside this room, which I’m beginning to forget the texture of.
Her mouth, full and angellike, it does something specific when she's thinking. A slight compression on the left side, and I know because I watched her for…for how long?
Memories scatter, flow, fade, explode.
We’re in the kitchen. It arrives without warning, whole and specific, and for a moment, the cell disappears entirely and I’m somewhere else.
Paris. Morning.
The unique quality of light through the kitchen window, low and gold, catching the steam off the oven, and the smell—God, the smell of it, apple and cinnamon and brown sugar, warm and sweet and so far from copper and bleach that my body doesn't know what to do with the memory of it.
I was making muffins.
There’s no way to explain that to anyone who knows what I am. What I do. The things my hands have been used for. But it’s her favorite, and I wanted to see her face when she smelled them. Because I wanted to do something with my hands that left something living, that told her I loved her.
She'd come out of the bedroom still half-asleep, hair loose, wearing my shirt.
The expression on her face. I've committed worse things to memory with less effort than it took to keep that expression.
The specific softness of it. The way her eyes went from sleep-blurred to present, finding me at her stove, and something settled in her face like a thing coming home.
And then I fucked her on the counter.
God, it hurts. This memory hurts like my chest’s being hacked open. Because I want it…I want the memory now. Not in the past. Now. Present.
My hands on her hips, pulling her to the edge of the counter with the muffins still in the oven behind me, and she smiled when she looked at my face and understood what I was going to do.
I want to stay in this memory. I want to live in it. The weight of her thighs in my hands, the way she'd gripped the counter edge and tipped her head back, and I'd watched her come apart right there in her kitchen with the smell of apple and cinnamon filling the air and her mouth saying—
Nazareth.
My name.
My actual name.
Not the designation, not the professional title, not Reth or boy or any of the other handles people have used for me across thirty years. Nazareth. Warm. Like she was glad the word existed. Like saying it was something she'd chosen rather than something she was required to do.
I can see her face, her lips parting with wild breaths as I fucked her, her inner walls clamping down on my cock while she came.
Afterward, she stayed on the counter, legs spread because I asked her to. Because she trusted me, because she looked at me and decided I was worth trusting, and I will never understand that decision, but I’m grateful for it in a way that has no bottom.
She sat on the edge of the counter with her hair loose around her shoulders and her green eyes watching me with that expression she had—the one that said ‘I see you, the actual you, not the version you perform’—and I…
An ache spreads through my stomach, and I groan in real time. Craving…it? Her?
I press my palms to my temples. Hold on.
Hold on to the memory.
The lollipops.
Pink. Heart-shaped.
“Even monsters deserve love sometimes.”
I've turned those words over so many times in the years since that they should have worn smooth by now. Gone meaningless with repetition. They haven't. They are still exactly as sharp as they were the first time, still capable of doing the same thing to my insides…just like her touch did.
Her hands.
God, her hands. Soft in a way that still surprises me when the memory surfaces—the specific softness of someone who has never had to use their hands for what I've used mine for, who has only ever used them for gentle things, for touching carefully, for meaning well.
She'd touched my face. She'd touched my scar, the raised line of it, not with the careful clinical detachment of someone managing their discomfort, but with her thumb just resting there. Like it was a part of me she loved and adored.
Blonde hair. Green eyes.
She's in Japan. She's in Japan with Ian keeping her safe, and remembering that part of the story produces a swell in my chest that might, in a pleasant moment, be called hope.
“Nazareth. Eat.” Valeria’s demonic whisper starts gnawing at the edges of the memories, slowly eating away at it. “You need to eat. Once you do, I’ll give you what you need.”
What I need.
Numbing. Relief. Right now, what I need is to get out of my own head for five seconds.
Stop thinking about the blonde and the kitchen and the sound her voice made when she laughed against my throat.
Stop thinking about the green-eyed woman in Japan with Ian, as if I’m a dog that can nag at a bone and bring someone back to me.
What I need is magic in my veins.
What you need is her. The one who sees you. The real you.
“Goddammit!” I grit out, pressing my hands hard against my skull. Whether I’m fighting the ache for relief, or the pain of losing her… I dunno.
Her name.
Her name.
Her name.
The image wavers. The kitchen fades. The gold of her hair goes thin at the edges, and I reach for it, I press my hands against it in my mind, and for a moment I have it—her face, complete, her green eyes and the compression on the left side of her mouth and the exact specific sound of my name said like it was worth saying—
Nazareth.
I hold it.
I hold it.
Sophia.
There. The name, finally. The stone at the bottom of the water, reached.
Sophia Sophia Sophia.