4. Reth #2
I press it into the inside of my skull like a mark I'm trying to make permanent. She’s in Japan. With Ian, who has the protocol, who will keep her where I put her, who will not let anything—
My chest does something that isn't quite pain and isn't quite warmth. More like the memory of warmth. Like pressing a hand to a surface where something hot used to be.
I want her here. Not abstractly—specifically, physically, with the desperation of a man who has been in a stone room with no warmth for fuck knows how long.
I want her hands. The way she'd put her palm flat against my chest like she was checking whether my heart was running, like the answer mattered to her.
I want to pull her into my lap in the dark and feel her breathe and not have to perform anything, not have to be anything, just sit there with her weight against my chest and the smell of her hair and the silence she made when she was comfortable, different from all her other silences.
I want to feel like the person she said ‘I love you’ to.
So I eat the rice…because she'd want me to.
That's the only reason my hand moves, the only logic that cuts through the haze.
Not Valeria's voice, not the transaction, just the imagined version of Sophia watching me choose, and what her face would do.
“Good boy,” I hear Valeria say somewhere in the distance, and the sound of a needle meeting concrete deafens every thought, kills every memory, and Sophia’s face fades. Her warmth.
I drag myself across the floor and I do what I do, and the warmth comes, and above me the ceiling crack runs its course, and I think about blonde hair in Paris light until the thought goes soft and floats.
I don't know how much time passes before the slot opens again.
"Reth."
The voice is wrong. Not Valeria. Male. Rough with something I should be able to identify and keep—
Samuel.
I’m leaning with my back against the wall, needle still in my arm when his face in the slot resolves slowly.
I know this face. I know the controlled set of it, the particular economy of his expressions, the glass he keeps everything behind.
I have known this face for years. I can count on one wrecked hand the number of times I’ve seen something genuine move across it.
It’s not behind glass now.
It’s destroyed.
Tears running openly, not being managed, not being wiped away. His jaw is doing the thing jaws do when someone is trying to hold together something that has already broken.
"How…how could you?" His voice shakes. "She was your sister."
Something stirs in me. Underwater and slow.
A tear drops off his chin. "She loved you."
Yet she looked in the other direction when I was hurting.
"You were her big brother." He stops. His hand comes up over his mouth for a moment. Comes down. "My mom told me everything."
Mary told me everything too. How she pretended I was whole when she knew I was nothing but pieces.
The warmth in my veins goes cold. Or tries to. There's something, an edge somewhere, fighting to stay sharp.
"She told Rowan, too," he continues.
“Wha…” I swallow, the numbness slowly settling in. “What…what did she tell you?”
"She said you came in out of your mind and Mary tried to reach you and you—" His voice breaks apart.
He reassembles it. "My mom showed me what you did to her security guards, how you murdered them. You sick son of a bitch,” he bites out.
“And to think I believed you. I fucking believed you, thinking my mother was capable of all the shit you said she did.”
“She did—”
“Why did you do it, huh? Did she figure it out, all your lies?”
“Mary…”
“My son doesn't have a mother because of you!"
Lucas. The name lands somewhere below the haze. In the deep place. A small boy with Mary's eyes, a small boy who—
"Samuel." I push onto one arm. The room tilts. "Listen to me. Listen. Valeria is lying. She killed her. I…I was there, I watched her. I saw her hands on the—"
"Stop lying!” he shouts.
“I’m not—”
"You're lying on the floor of a cell in your own filth, expecting me to believe a single word that comes out of your disgusting mouth?"
The edge sharpens briefly. I hold on to it. "Everything she's ever told you, Samuel, everything she's ever—"
"Mary is in the ground." His voice drops to something quiet, almost worse than shouting. "My son asks for her. He wakes up and he asks for her, and I have to—" He presses his mouth together. "And you're down here getting high like you didn’t steal something from me. From my son."
No. No. No. No. No. What? I didn’t steal anything.
My arms quiver as I try to push myself up. "Samuel—"
"Don't." He shakes his head slowly. "You should thank God my mother has you locked in this room, or I’ll kill you with my bare fucking hands.”
I think of blonde hair. Green eyes. Sophia, stay in the house, stay with Ian, don't come looking, please don't come—
"I hope you burn in hell, motherfucker.”
He looks at me one more time through the slot. The look of a man who lost everything and he’s staring right at the cause.
The slot closes, the sound so very small.
I lie back on the floor. The haze settles like thick, warm syrup poured straight into my veins, slow and heavy and treacherous, flooding every capillary until my limbs turn to warm lead.
The constant burning crawl under my skin dulls to a distant itch, then melts into a false, golden calm that makes my eyelids flutter.
My heartbeat slows to a lazy thud, each pulse pushing the drug deeper, spreading it through muscle and bone until even the sharp edges of my ruined hands stop screaming.
The stench of my own filth—vomit crusted on my chest, old blood flaking from my knuckles—fades into something almost tolerable, like background noise.
Samuel’s face fades, manageable, filed away alongside everything else that I can’t hold at full volume right now.
For a few blessed seconds, the room stops tilting, the ceiling crack stops crawling like a living thing, and the screaming void where Mary used to be quiets to a low, distant hum.
But I know this warmth. I know how it lies.
Beneath it, the real me is still clawing, still rotting, still starving for something cleaner than this poison. Still reaching for blonde hair and green eyes and the only touch that ever made any of this feel worth surviving.
Blonde hair. Green eyes.
Sophia.
I can still see her. The image still comes when I call it. That means something. I don't know what it means, but it means something.
Samuel thinks I killed Mary. I didn’t kill Mary. I put the thought out into the room. Let it sit. The certainty it carries is the same as yesterday. Solid enough.
Valeria says I was screaming when her men found me. She says the way I was screaming—she says people who watch something don't—
My hands.
I look at my hands in the dim light. The damage on them. I know how some of it happened—the door, the walls, I remember the door and the walls. But some of it I can't account for, the specific pattern of it, and I look at it and I try to remember and the haze pulls and I can't—
She had the poker.
She did. She was the one. I saw her. She was standing over—
Wasn't she standing over…?
I was there. Wasn’t I?
Dead eyes. Seeping blood. It’s on my knees, my hands.
Mary’s dead. She hurt me. I know she did because I can still feel it tearing at my heart, chipping away at my spine. My own sister…she betrayed me. Hurt me.
I didn’t kill her, Samuel.
I didn’t. It wasn’t me. It was…me?
No. No. No. No.
Sophia. I pull the image up fast. Blonde. Green eyes. Paris. A window. The way her breath felt against my throat when she slept, slow and even, the peaceful rhythm of a person who had decided, at least for now, that they were safe.
She made me feel like I was worth that.
I didn't kill Mary.
The certainty is the same.
The same.
Is it the same?
...Is it?
The ceiling crack runs its course. Branches once. Stops short.
Sophia's face floats and blurs and floats again.
I close my eyes and hold on to the gold of her hair like a rope in the dark, and I don't let go, I don't let go, I don't—
I don't let go.
Did I?