8. Sophia
SOPHIA
It’s two in the morning, and I lie on the futon for a moment, staring at the ceiling. The last few days have been wrong.
Not wrong like before—not the wrong of not-knowing, of counting days and watching the gate and waiting for flowers that don't come. This is a different wrong. Smaller and closer and entirely of our own making.
Ian’s one-hour runs have changed to two hours every morning. Making breakfast is no longer a way to carry conversation to take my mind off everything, but rather gives him somewhere to put his eyes that isn't me.
Yesterday, he came home with four bags of groceries from a store forty minutes away when there's one at the end of the road. The day before that he was asleep—or performing sleep—by eight p.m.
I let him do it, construct these small, careful distances, and I don't call him on any of them because I don't know what I would say if I did. I know you're avoiding me. I'm doing it, too, just from a different direction.
The kiss lives in the kitchen. That's where I feel it most—standing at the counter where his hands were, where the muffin tray hit the tile, where I said don't apologize, I kissed you back and meant it and have been living with meaning it ever since.
I go in there every morning and make coffee and sit at the table, and the room holds what happened in it the way rooms do, and Ian comes in from his two-hour run and makes eggs and talks about something that requires no emotional navigation, and I let him.
We eat. We talk. We move through the day side by side with the thing between us that neither of us is touching.
I love Reth. That hasn't changed. If anything, it's sharper, the way things get sharp when you've done something that clarifies what matters.
But loving him completely hasn't stopped whatever this is with Ian from existing, and I don't know what to do with that, and the not-knowing sits in the house alongside everything else.
I’m still staring up at the ceiling when the silence changes. It’s not a sound, exactly. More like a shift in the air. Something moving through the walls that my body registers before my mind catches up. Something’s wrong, a different kind of wrong it’s been the last few days.
I stand, open my door, and peer down the dark hallway. Ian's door is open. That’s what’s wrong. Ian sleeps with his door closed—always, without exception, a security habit so ingrained it's become architectural. I have never once seen it open at night.
I stand in the hallway and look at the open door and the empty room beyond it and feel the thing in my chest that I've been managing shift into something sharper, colder.
Ian’s in the kitchen standing by the window with his back to me, phone in his hand, still dressed. Not just-got-up dressed. Still-in-yesterday's-clothes dressed. He hasn't slept.
"Ian. What’s going on?"
He turns. The expression on his face—the specific rearrangement that happens when he registers it's me—tells me everything before he says a word. He was expecting someone else, and I walked in before he was ready for me, the performance not assembled yet.
"Hey." Too casual. "What are you doing up?"
"Question is what are you doing up."
He glances toward the hallway. A flicker of something, and then it’s gone. "Couldn't sleep. Go back to bed."
"You're still dressed."
"I was—I got up early. Sophia, go back—"
"What's happening?"
It isn't a question. He hears that. He looks at me, and there’s a long moment where something moves behind his eyes, and then he turns back to the window.
"Nothing," he says. "Go back to bed."
"Ian." I cross the kitchen and stand beside him at the window. Outside, the garden is dark, the persimmon tree a black shape against the slightly lighter dark of the pre-dawn sky. My pulse is roaring in my ears. "Look at me."
He does, and his eyes are tired in a way that has nothing to do with sleep. They’re haunted, carrying something enormous and terrible.
"Talk to me," I say quietly, my voice cracking despite myself.
“I just—” he pulls a palm down his face “—I need you to go back to bed.”
“Stop doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Shutting me out. You’ve been doing it ever since—”
"Ever since I kissed you." His gaze is fixed on mine, and my cheeks warm.
Neither of us looks away.
"Yes," I say quietly. "Ever since that."
He turns back to the window. A muscle moves in his jaw. "I'm not shutting you out. I'm just—" He stops.
"Taking two hour runs?"
A beat.
"Driving twenty minutes for groceries?"
Another beat.
"Going to bed at nine-thirty like a man with absolutely nothing on his mind."
He exhales. Almost a laugh. Almost. "Sophia—"
"You're not subtle, Ian."
He looks at me then, and what's in his face is so unguarded it almost hurts to look at directly.
Tired and conflicted and something else underneath both of those—something that hasn't gone anywhere since the kitchen, since the muffin tray hitting the tile, since his forehead pressed to mine in the dark.
"What do you want me to do?" he says. Not defensive. Genuinely asking. "Tell me what you want me to do with this, Sophia, because I'm running out of grocery lists."
"I don't want you to do anything with it." I look at the window, at the dark garden beyond it. "I just want you to stop disappearing. I'd rather have the tension than lose you to it."
The silence stretches.
"Yeah," he says finally. Soft. "Okay."
"Okay?"
"Okay." He looks at his phone. Something shifts in his face—the personal conversation closing, something else opening. Something heavier. "Sophia. I need you to go back to bed."
And I hear it this time. The difference. This isn't him conceding. This is him when he’s actively trying to keep something from me and would say anything to get me to leave.
"Ian." My pulse spikes. "What's happening?"
Not a question. He hears that too.
He opens his mouth. His phone lights up.
“Who is that?” I press. “Is it Reth?”
For a single second, hope flares too bright, too real, and I’m already feeling Reth’s arms around me, already expecting his lips to claim mine. But while Ian holds my gaze, I can see the war—the part of him that wants to protect me from whatever this is, and the sliver of hope fades.
There’s something different in his eyes, something sharper, more terrifying.
He looks at his phone’s screen, and his jaw tightens so hard I hear the click of his teeth.
"I have to go outside," he says. He's already moving toward the door, pulling on his jacket from the hook with the quick efficiency of someone who doesn't want to give me time to respond. "Stay inside. I'll be right back."
A chill seeps in as he opens the back door and steps out into the garden before I can say anything, leaving a vacuum of terror behind him.
I stand in the kitchen for exactly three seconds, heart slamming against my ribs, every instinct screaming that if I let him walk out there alone something irreversible will happen.
Then I follow him.
He hears my footsteps on the path and turns sharply. "Sophia—"
"Don't." I pull my cardigan tighter against the pre-dawn chill and keep walking, my bare feet cold on the stones. "Don't tell me to go inside."
"I need you to—"
"Ian." I stop in front of him on the garden path, close enough that he can't look past me.
Tears are already burning in my eyes. "You have been managing me for twenty-five days.
You have been very good at it, and I have let you because I understood why and because some part of me wasn't ready to stop being managed.
" I hold his gaze, my voice shaking. "But whatever is happening right now, I need to know.
So I am not going back inside. I can't. Not when it feels like the world is ending out here and you're trying to keep me from seeing it. "
There's a look on his face—frustrated and frightened and something else underneath both of them. His eyes are glassy. The garden is dark and the pre-dawn air is warm and thick, and somewhere down the road a dog barks once and goes quiet.
He looks at me for a long moment, eyes roving over my features like he’s staring at something precious. "I need to find Reth."
I blink. "But you said we had to wait. The protocol—”
“Fuck the protocol.”
“I don’t…” I search his face. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I want to find him, too, but this whole time you’ve been giving me nothing but reasons not to. That searching for him risks exposing us, and it’s too dangerous. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“Because everything's changed," he blurts.
"Everything's fucking changed, Sophia." He drags a hand through his hair.
"Three weeks I've been sitting in that house telling you the protocol exists for a reason, telling you we wait, we stay dark, we trust the system.
And I believed it. I did. Because that's what he asked me to do, and I—" He stops.
His jaw tightens. "And then you're in the kitchen at midnight falling apart over muffins, and when I kissed you—” He cuts himself off, gaze fixed on me like I’m his true north.
“When I kissed you, the truth knocked me off my ass, Crazy.”
I press my lips together, then, “What truth?”
He hesitates, placing his hands on his hips like he’s afraid they’d reach for me. “That somewhere between the mountains and Paris and Greece and Japan…I’ve started to feel more for you than I’m allowed to.”
My heart does something it’s never done before. It breaks and splinters into tiny sharp-edged piece of grief. “Ian—”
He rushes up to me, grabs my face in his palms, forcing me to look up and into his eyes.
“I have to find him, Sophia. Not just because he's my friend.
Not just because I love him like a brother.
But because the longer I stay here with you, the more I fall for you.
And I can't fucking leave, I can’t walk away from you because I made the man who saved my life more than once a promise.
" A beat, his gaze studying me. "So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, Crazy.
And I'd like to get out of it before I do anything I know I won't regret, but it’ll hurt the two people I care most about in this entire goddamn world. "
The garden holds still around us.
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse. So I just look at him, and he looks at me, and the truth of it sits between us in the dark, finally named, finally out in the open air where it can't fester.
Ian’s thumb traces my bottom lip, and I see everything in his eyes.
The desperation, the longing, the ache, the absolute guilt for wanting something—someone that’s not his.
And that’s what I am. Not his. I never will be, because everything I am, everything I ever will be belongs to Nazareth, in this lifetime and the next.
“I’m sorry.” My lips quiver with the words.
“Don’t be.” His hand finds the back of my neck, and he leans down, placing a tender kiss on my head. “I’m going to bring him back to you, Crazy. I fucking swear it.”
Then the gate opens, and Ian steps back as we both turn. The man who comes through it is large, and he moves in a way I’ve learned to recognize in men who exist in Reth's world.
I know him—it takes a half-second, the low pre-dawn light rearranging his face, but I know him. The flatness of his features. The clipped Eastern European stillness of him. The eyes that sweep the garden before they settle on anything.
He brought Reth home from Prague.
"Andrei," I say, my voice barely above a whisper.
He stops. Looks at me. Then at Ian, raising a questioning brow.
"She’s a part of this now," Ian says. The tone of it is not quite an apology and not quite an explanation.
Andrei's eyes come back to me. That flat, assessing look—the file being updated, new information being processed. Last time he saw me, I was a woman being held captive. Now I’m a woman in a garden in Japan at four in the morning who followed Ian outside in her pajamas because she refused to be left behind.
Because the fear of not knowing is worse than any truth he could bring.
"Inside," Andrei says. One word. A decision.
We go inside.