26. Sophia
SOPHIA
I'm sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded tightly in my lap, listening to the specific quality of silence downstairs that tells me Rowan has left.
The front door. A car engine turning over.
Then nothing but the low hum of the mountain wind against the glass and the particular stillness of a house exhaling after something significant has moved through it.
The door opens.
I look at him, and I already know. From the rigid set of his jaw. The way he's carrying himself—not tense, exactly, but weighted, like something massive has been laid across his shoulders and he hasn't decided yet whether to bear it or burn it.
His eyes find mine across the room, and they're doing the thing they do when he's holding something large—present, clear, but darker than usual, a winter sky before a storm rather than after one.
He crosses to the side table without speaking. Sets a folded piece of paper on it without opening it. The sound of it landing is almost nothing, just paper against wood, but in the quiet of the room it has weight.
Then he sits beside me on the bed. Forearms on his knees. Hands loose between them. Staring at the floor like it might give him something the ceiling won't.
I look at the side of his face. At the scar I know by touch. At the jaw working slightly, the way it does when he's running through something internally that he hasn't found the words for yet.
I wait.
I've learned how to wait for him. Silence with most people feels like something to fill. With Reth, it's always felt like something to respect. Like the silence is doing work that words would only interrupt.
So I sit with my hands in my lap, and I let it do its work.
"Rowan handed Valeria over," he says finally, the voice he uses when he's keeping himself very controlled around something that wants to be uncontrolled. "Location. Schedule. The guards, which ones can be removed, and which ones already have been." He pauses. "We have her if we want her.”
I catch it immediately. We. Not I have her or she's mine if I want her—we.
One small word carrying everything he isn't saying out loud yet, the assumption so quietly built into it.
And it lands somewhere in my chest with a warmth I wasn't expecting, because it means that even now, even sitting on the edge of this bed with something cold and ancient gathering behind his eyes, his first instinct is that whatever comes next includes me.
That it was never going to be something he did alone.
That I was already in it before he asked.
I shift lightly. “And you trust him enough to know this isn’t a trap?”
He almost laughs. Not quite—just a short exhale through his nose, the sound of a man who has considered something from every angle and arrived at a conclusion that doesn't entirely sit right but holds anyway.
"I've never trusted Rowan." He says it plainly, no bitterness in it, just fact. He looks at the folded paper on the side table. "But knowing someone and trusting them are different things, and I know Rowan well enough to read the difference between a trap and a transaction."
"And this is a transaction?"
"This is him cashing out." He leans back slightly, forearms still on his knees.
"Valeria stopped being useful to him the moment she started acting from obsession instead of strategy.
She damaged his operation, drew attention he couldn't contain.” His jaw tightens.
"Handing her to me isn't generosity. It's housekeeping.
He's removing a liability and collecting on a debt simultaneously.
" A beat. "That's not a trap. That's just Rowan being exactly who he's always been. "
"The debt?”
He breathes out loudly. “Ian doing something unfathomably stupid.” Something moves through Reth's face.
Something that costs him to let me see. "He won't tell me what it is yet.
But I saw his face when Rowan was talking.
Whatever he gave up, it's already done. It's not reversible.
" He's quiet for a beat. "And whatever it is, it's significant.
I know Ian well enough to know the difference between him managing information and him carrying something heavy. This is the second one."
I look at him. At the way he's holding himself—the conflict sitting right on the surface, the want and the guilt running alongside each other in a way he's not trying to hide from me.
"You're angry with him," I say.
"I don't have the right to be angry with him." His jaw works. "He got me out. Whatever he gave Rowan, he gave it so I could be sitting here instead of still in that cell, and I know that, and it doesn't stop me from wanting to put him through a fucking wall for it."
"That's not contradiction," I say quietly. "That's just loving someone."
He looks at me.
"You can be grateful and furious simultaneously," I continue. "You can know someone did the right thing and still wish they hadn't had to do it. Those aren't competing feelings, Reth. They're the same feeling from different angles."
He's quiet for a moment.
"He's going to tell me eventually," he says. "Whatever it is."
"Yes."
"And I'm not going to like it."
"Probably not."
I look at his hands. At the compass on his left hand, needle pointing north—toward me, always toward me, the promise he made permanent in ink before he fully understood what he was promising.
He turns his head slightly, not quite looking at me yet.
"I want her." Quiet. Raw. The admission of something he's been holding tightly for a very long time. “I’ve wanted this for years, Sophia. It’s right there on that piece of paper. And I can feel what that does to me… and I don’t know what it costs a person. What it does to a person on the other side of it. I don’t know what Ian traded to make it possible, and I can’t want something this badly without knowing what I’m really choosing. ”
I put my hand over his.
He looks down at it. Then slowly up at me.
"What do you want, Sophia?" His voice is very quiet now.
"Tell me what you actually want. Not what you think I need to hear.
Not the clinical answer. What you actually want.
" His eyes hold mine. "Because if you want to leave right now, tonight, as far from this mountain as we can get, I’ll do it.
I'll let her go. I'll find another way to carry it.
" A beat. "But I need to know what you want before I decide anything.
Because I'm not doing this without you. I won't."
I sit with that for a moment. Think about every framework I've ever been trained in.
Revenge as a cycle. Vengeance versus justice.
The research on what carrying violence does to the person who carries it.
The clinical arguments I've made to other people in other rooms about why retribution doesn't heal the wound, only moves it.
I think about all of it. And then I imagine Reth as a boy. Alone. Broken. Being dragged through hell simply because someone found it easy. I think of him in that cell being mentally, emotionally, physically torn apart. About what she did to his body. About Mary.
Then I think about what it means to spend the rest of our lives knowing she’s out there. Breathing. Living. Moving through the world with her elegant coats and her charity galas and her calm, composed smile that never once faltered while she destroyed the man I love.
There’s no version of moving on that has Valeria alive in it. Not for him. And not for me either.
The thought settles heavily in my chest—part terror, part relief.
Because some part of me, a dark and hungry part I didn’t know existed until I fell in love with this broken, beautiful man, wants her gone just as badly as he does.
I hate that about myself. I hate how easily the desire for her suffering slides into place beside my love for him.
But I can’t unknow what she did. I can’t unsee the scars on his body or the nightmares that still wake him up gasping. I can’t pretend that justice and mercy feel like enough anymore.
"We stay," I say.
He goes very still.
"We stay," I say again, more certain this time, the certainty arriving fully formed now that I've said it once. "And you get to have this."
"Sophia—"
"I know what I'm saying." I turn to face him fully.
"I know every argument against it. I've made those arguments to other people in other rooms for years.
I know what the research says and what the clinical consensus is and what revenge does to the person holding the blade.
" I hold his gaze. "And I'm telling you that none of it is louder right now than knowing she's alive somewhere while you're still carrying what she did to you.
While Ian is carrying whatever he paid. While Mary is—" I stop.
Breathe. "There's no moving forward with her in the world.
Not really. Not for you. And I'm done pretending there is. "
Something shifts in his face. Opens slightly, then closes again, like he's making sure before he lets himself feel it.
“You understand what I’m asking you to be okay with,” he says. Not a question. A final check. The kind a man does when he needs to be certain before he moves forward with something that can’t be undone.
“Not just that she dies. The how of it. Because there’s no version of this where she dies quickly.
I can’t—” He clears his throat, roughing a hand through his hair.
“I know that once I hear her scream, see her bleed, I’m gonna want more of it.
So much more.” He breathes, like he can already see it, feel it, taste it.
“And the thing I’ll have to become… I need you to be sure—completely sure—that you can look at me afterward and not see something you can’t come back from. ”
I hold his gaze for a long moment, heart pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat.