13. Reth #2
Then something shifts.
Her nails feel longer. Sharper. Dragging down my neck with just a little too much pressure.
Her kiss deepens, but it’s different now—hungrier in the wrong way. Possessive. Cruel.
I try to pull back, but she chases my mouth, biting my lower lip hard enough to sting.
“Such a good boy,” she murmurs against my lips, voice sliding from Sophia’s sweet rasp into something darker, smoother, colder. “Look how hard you get for me. Even after everything.”
My blood runs cold.
Jesus, no. Not again.
I snarl, shoving her back against the wall. But her legs stay locked around me, thighs squeezing like she knows I won’t really fight her. Not yet.
Her eyes flicker. Green bleeding into dark brown. Honey hair darkening at the roots. That cruel smile I’ve hated for years curves her lips.
“Still so easy to break,” she purrs, voice now fully hers.
Hate detonates inside my chest like a bomb. Rage bursting through the seams.
“Get the fuck away from me!”
I rip my hand free, and the karambit is there—cold, familiar, real—and in one fluid, violent motion I drag the blade from her navel straight up to her sternum.
It’s not a decision I make. It’s a fucking reflex, stabbing the blade into her hard, deep. The steel sinks in, and for the first time in my entire goddamn life, it feels right.
I feel every inch of it. The way her skin parts so easily under the edge. The resistance of muscle, then the satisfying give as I lean in harder, snarling with years of pent-up rage, years of her voice in my head, her control wrapped around my throat like a leash.
I saw the blade upward with everything I have, teeth bared, a guttural sound tearing out of me that isn’t human.
This is for every night she made me paint my face. For every time she whispered my name like she owned it. For every time she made me choose between those I loved and my own fucking soul.
Blood surges hot over my hand, soaking my chest, but I don’t care. I want it. I want to drown in it.
I twist the blade deliberately as I drag it higher, feeling it catch on bone, feeling her body jerk and convulse against mine, and a dark, vicious wave of satisfaction crashes through me so strong it makes me dizzy.
Finally.
Her eyes widen. That cruel, perfect mouth opens in a shocked gasp that turns into a wet, gurgling rattle. Her legs twitch around my waist, still locked like she thinks she can keep me even now.
I hold her there, pinned to the wall, watching the light drain from her eyes, and I feel something inside my chest break open—years of shame, of helplessness, of being her fucking weapon finally cracking apart.
“You don’t own me anymore,” I growl against her dying mouth, voice shaking with pure, feral relief. “You never fucking did.”
I pull the blade free with a wet, sucking sound and step back, letting her body slide down the wall.
“What have you done?”
I twist around.
Mary is standing in the middle of the room, eyes wide with horror, staring at the body behind me.
“It’s over,” I say, jaw clenched, voice raw with exhaustion and triumph. “It’s finally fucking over.”
“I told you,” she whispers, voice small and devastated. “I told you you’d kill her.”
I frown. Something’s wrong. The body behind me shifts. The hair changes from black to honey. The curves change. The face—
Sophia.
She’s lying in the middle of the room now, not against the wall. Blood pooling beneath her, the long, vicious gash from navel to sternum still gaping open, intestines glistening wetly in the low light. Her eyes—those beautiful green eyes—are open, staring at the ceiling, unblinking.
No.
I drop the karambit. It clatters loudly on the floor.
“No… no no no—” I stumble toward her, knees hitting the ground hard beside her body. My hands hover over the wound, shaking, covered in her blood.
“Sophia—fuck—Sophia, please—”
Her head lolls toward me. Those eyes find mine, filled with betrayal and pain.
“You promised,” she whispers, blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth. “You promised you’d never hurt me.”
I press my hands to the wound, trying to hold her together, but the blood just keeps pouring between my fingers, hot and endless.
“I didn’t—I thought—I thought you were her—”
Mary’s voice comes from behind me. “Valeria was right. You are a monster.”
"Shut up!” I scream at her. “Please, God. Sophia, look at me, look at me, I need you to—"
Suddenly, I’m on the other side of the room. And I'm holding the karambit again. Covered in blood.
My hand won't open. I’m screaming at it inside my skull—open, drop it, let go, you motherfucker, LET GO—but my fingers stay curled around the handle with that terrifying, ingrained precision.
Muscle memory. Years of training. Thousands of kills. The blade is part of me. The one thing Valeria made sure I would never hesitate with. The one thing that has always known what to do when the rest of me was too weak or too human to act.
"No." The word comes out in pieces. "No no no no. What the fuck did I do? Sophia?” I scream, still unable to let go of the karambit.
The horror is bottomless.
The realization is worse than any drug, worse than any chain, worse than anything Valeria has ever done to me. It’s the kind of horror that strips a man down to the bone and leaves him staring at the monster he’s always been.
My vision tunnels. My heart hammers so hard like it’s trying to punch its way out of my chest. Sweat mixes with the blood on my skin, and I’m shaking.
“Sophia, no. Please. I would never— I couldn’t— I love you, I love you—”
The karambit stays in my grip. Warm. Wet. Accusing.
“It was you.”
Mary’s voice. Not Valeria’s. From everywhere.
“It was always going to be you.”
“No.” A scream now. Everything now. “No—”
“You knew.” Quieter. Worse. “Some part of you always knew what your hands would do to the things you love. You’ve always known. That’s why you watched from the shadows for so long. That’s why you kept your distance. That’s why you built walls and protocols and rules—”
“Shut up—”
“Because you knew what happens when you get close. You know what you are. And you let her in anyway. You let her in and look—”
I look at Sophia. At her white shirt.
At the red.
At my hand.
At the blade.
Something in me—the last thing, the thing I’ve been holding together with her name and the compass and the memory of muffins in a Paris kitchen and a pink lollipop on Halloween night—that thing gives way.
Not loudly. Quietly.
The way the worst things always go.
“You are the thing—”
“—that destroys what it loves,” I finish, and my chest gets torn open. Flesh torn off my bones. Too hot. Too tight. Too much.
“Valeria didn’t make you this,” Mary continues. “She just found it. Shaped it. Gave it a blade—”
“—and a purpose and called it hers.” I look at the karambit again.
“I did this.” Not a scream. Not even a thought really. Just a fact arriving. Already finished before I knew it had started.
I did this to her.
The way I did it to Mary.
The way I do everything.
The way I will always—
The room tilts. The weight of what hasn’t happened yet—of what I might do, of what I’ve already done—coils tighter and tighter in my gut until I can’t breathe.
“I didn’t mean to…”
The hallucination fractures. Sophia is gone. Mary is gone. The room is just the room again.
Stone. Gray. The smell that never leaves.
My hands are empty. The karambit is gone.
I turn my hands over. Check. Turn them over again. Check again. Because the blood was there. The blade was there. I felt it. The weight of it. The specific familiar weight of a thing I’ve held a thousand times.
And now it’s gone.
Like Mary.
Like Sophia.
Like the lollipop.
Like everything in this room that was ever clean.
I press my palms against the wall. Both hands. Hard. Feeling the cold move through the skin, through the compass ink, through whatever is underneath both of those things that used to feel like certainty and now just feels like the outline of something that used to exist.
The slot opens.
I don’t look up. I know the sound of it. I know every sound this door makes.
“Nazareth.”
Her voice. Real this time. Not from the walls. From the slot. From the specific small rectangle of slightly less dark that appears at eye height when she wants to look in at what she’s made.
I don’t move.
“You were screaming.” A pause. The quality of her attention comes through the door like something physical. “The name.” Her voice is careful. The careful of a surgeon. “Who is Sophia?”
Something in my chest moves. Protective. Automatic. The last reflex of a man whose defenses have been stripped to almost nothing.
“You know who she is.”
“I’m afraid I don’t.” A beat. “I’ve heard you say the name before. In your sleep. When the drugs thin. I’ve been curious.”
“You’re not curious.” My voice. Flat. “You don’t get curious. You get strategic.”
A sound that might be approval. “Tell me anyway.”
“Fuck you!”
The door opens.
Valeria comes in like she always does—unhurried, elegant, like the room rearranges itself to accommodate her. She stops a few feet away and looks at me.
Really looks.
The inventory. The assessment. The specific quality of attention that has never once been about me and has always been about what I represent.
If my hand wasn’t chained, I’d…fuck, the things I’d do to her.
“You can’t fathom how much I hate you.”
She grins. “It didn’t feel like hate when your cock was inside me.”
The horror and self-loathing twist together into something feral. I lunge against the chain again, wrist tearing open, blood running hot down my arm. “I’m gonna rip your fucking throat out with my teeth.”
“Oh, Nazareth,” she purrs. “We both know you’ll be begging for it again soon enough.”
“Fuck!” Spit explodes from my mouth. Because I know…I fucking know she can make it happen again. And again. And again.
My eyes drop to her hand—the small glass vial she’s holding between her fingers, the liquid inside catching the dim light and turning it that sick, golden color I both hate and crave with every cell in my body.