28. Sophia
SOPHIA
There’s something about seeing his face painted. Seeing the mask. I remember it vaguely, Halloween night. The lollipop. I’m not afraid of him like this. There’s no version of him I’ll ever be afraid of.
Reth’s hand is steady and warm on the small of my back as he guides me into the room.
I told him I wanted to see her. I wanted to look the monster in the eyes and know she could never touch us again.
Valeria is chained to that ridiculous gilded chair, face smeared with the same black and white paint Reth wears. Blood runs in thick, slow trails from the word PRETTY carved deep into her forehead.
Acts of violence have never been something I can tolerate. I’ve spent my career trying to pull people back from the edge of them, trying to understand the pain that creates them.
But seeing Valeria like this—broken, painted, bleeding from the word Reth carved into her forehead—makes something dark and satisfied unfurl low in my belly. A quiet, vicious sense of justice.
She deserves this.
After everything she did to him, she deserves to feel even a fraction of what she made him endure.
Her elegant dress is torn open down the front, her breasts fully exposed, streaked red with fresh blood that continues to ooze and run in heavy drops from her chin.
She looks ruined. A bleeding parody of the powerful woman she once was.
Her painted eyes are wide with pain and fury, her body trembling against the chains with every shallow, agonized breath.
And still, she lifts her chin like she’s the one in control.
I stop a few feet in front of her. Reth stays close behind me, his body a wall of heat at my back.
Valeria’s bloody lips curl into a mocking smile.
“Well,” she rasps, voice hoarse but still dripping with that old venom. “The little therapist. I wondered when he’d drag you down here to gloat. Come to see what a real monster looks like, darling?”
I hold her gaze. My heart is pounding, but my voice comes out steady. “I came to see what’s left of you after everything you did to him.”
She laughs—a wet sound that turns into a cough as blood trickles into her mouth. “Everything I did to him? Sweet girl, I made him. Without me, he would have been nothing.”
"Everything you made," I say, giving it room, "chose me.”
I watch it move through her. Slowly. The way real damage moves—not the sharp, immediate sting of a cut but the deep, spreading cold of something that has found the place underneath the armor where there's nothing left to protect.
“Everything you spent years building,” I saunter up close, “walked away from you and chose. Me.”
"You don't—" she starts. Stops. Her voice is different now. Still controlled, barely, but different, thinner at the edges, like something load-bearing has just given way underneath the architecture. "You don't understand what it took. What I—"
"I understand exactly what it took. That's what makes it worse for you, doesn't it? That I know the full cost of what you did, and I'm standing here anyway. And he's standing here with me." I hold her gaze. "You gave everything you had to own him. And all it got you was this room."
Her face does something then that I don't think she can stop. It crumbles. The composure fracturing along lines that have been under pressure for too long, the mask showing its seams in a way that no cut, no carved letter, no blood has managed to produce.
The cuts and the pain are something she can endure. But this? She can’t.
The truth of it. The simplicity of it.
I lean down, my hands on my knees as I bring my eyes to her level. “How does it feel,” I ask softly, “to know that the one thing you wanted most in the world is the thing that’s going to send you to hell?”
Her eyes slide to Reth, then back to me, gleaming with malice.
“You think you’re special? You think you’re the one who finally saved him?” She tries to lean forward, snarls from the pain, then stills. “You’re not special, darling. We both know what his cock feels like. How he fucks when he’s trying to forget who he really belongs to.”
The words hit like a slap, and I stand there, letting it sink in. The therapist in me notes the tactic automatically—last resort, pure desperation, the specific cruelty of a woman who has lost every other weapon and is reaching for the one she thinks will find the gap in the armor.
She wants shame. She wants me to shrink. She wants to watch me look at Reth differently and see in that second that she still has power over something in this room.
She's miscalculated. Because what moves through me isn't shame. Isn't doubt. It's something I didn't know I was capable of until I fell in love with this man. Something hot and clean and entirely without apology, rising up through my chest and settling there like it's always belonged.
Possession.
Not the kind she understands. Not ownership, not control, not the dependency she built and called devotion. The kind that comes from being chosen. From choosing back. From standing in rooms together that should have broken both of us and walking out the other side still holding on.
“You think you know what his body feels like. You don’t. You know what else you don’t know?” I slant my head. “How it feels to be loved by him.”
It lands exactly the way I intended it to. Hard. Destructive. True.
She’s in so much pain. It’s in every labored breath she takes. In the way her eyes roll every few seconds. Yet she manages a smile, something cruel, something evil.
“Do you see me when he fucks you?” Her chest rises and falls. “Do you see my hands on him, my pussy taking his cock, taking the one thing you thought would only ever be yours?”
It doesn’t hurt the way she wants it to. She’s reaching because everything else failed and this is the last thing she has, the claim that what happened in that cell belongs to her.
I'm going to take that from her too.
The thought arrives fully formed, certain, without hesitation.
I turn to Reth, rise onto my toes and kiss him.
The kind of kiss that says everything I haven't put into words yet—that I'm here, that I chose this, that I'm not afraid of this room or what's in it or what comes next.
His hand finds my waist automatically, the way it always does, like my body is somewhere his hands already know to go.
When I pull back, his eyes are dark, searching my face.
I bring my mouth to his ear. "I want her to watch you choose me," I whisper. "I want her to see exactly who you belong to now."
His grip tightens on my waist.
"Sophia." Low. Warning and question at the same time.
"She said we both know what you feel like." I pull back just enough to look at his painted face. "She's wrong. She never knew. She had your body. She never had you choosing to give it." I hold his gaze. "There's a difference, and I want her to see it."
Something moves through his expression. Deep. Complicated.
"You don't have to prove anything," he says. "Not to her."
"I'm not proving anything." I reach beneath my dress, let my panties fall around my feet, then brush my thumb across the edge of the paint on his jaw. "I'm taking something back. The same way you are." A beat. "We came here together. We finish it together."
His forehead drops to mine.
"Are you sure." Not a question anymore.
I press another kiss to the corner of his painted mouth. “I’m yours, Nazareth. And you’re mine. Show her what that looks like.”