Chapter 7
SOPHIA
The flowers aren't there.
I know it the second my fingers brush the doorknob—like the morning itself has been holding its breath and finally let it out wrong. The hallway stretches empty under the weak Paris light filtering through the stairwell window. No glass vase. No delicate flower heads greeting me, giving me hope.
There’s nothing.
And just like that, fear sinks its teeth in—slow, vicious heavy.
My stomach drops first, a sick, plunging weight that leaves me hollow. Then it crawls upward, wrapping cold fingers around my lungs until every breath feels stolen.
What if they finally broke him completely. Unrepairable?
What if the last thing he did was try to send me those flowers, one final fragile promise that he was still fighting, still thinking of me?
What if right now he’s on his knees somewhere dark and endless, bleeding, broken, while a woman whose name I don’t know carves away every piece of the man who once looked at me like I was the only light he’d ever been allowed to keep?
My knees threaten to buckle.
The image is so vivid—his scarred face streaked with blood that isn’t his, those winter-blue eyes dimming as they force him to choose between survival and me again—that a soft, broken sound escapes my throat before I can swallow it.
I press my palm hard against the doorframe, nails digging into wood, because if I let go, I might fall apart right here in my socks on this quiet Paris morning.
Reth stayed behind so I could run. He stayed behind. And now the flowers aren’t here, and the silence in this hallway feels exactly like the sound of him being taken from me all over again.
I take a deep breath—in through my nose and out my mouth.
Maybe there’s a simple reason for this. Maybe the delivery is running late.
Maybe there’s traffic. Maybe they were out of the specific color he ordered and were outsourcing, trying to find the exact ones he wanted me to have today.
I tell myself that there are a hundred explanations and none of them mean what the cold feeling in my chest is trying to scream they mean.
I close the door and go make coffee.
I drink it standing at the kitchen window, eyes on the pale rooftops of Paris waking up around me. A pigeon flaps clumsily on the ledge across the street. Somewhere below, a scooter snarls around a corner too fast. Everything looks exactly the way it should. Normal. Cruelly, indifferently normal.
I drink the coffee, and I don’t think about it.
I think about it constantly.
Ian’s door is still closed at half past eight.
Through the wood, I can hear the slow, deep rhythm of his snoring—the sleep of a man who’s learned to rest anywhere, without guilt or apology.
Three months of sharing this apartment, and I know that rhythm the way I know the exact tilt of his head when he’s lying, the way he says my name when he’s trying not to care, and the particular kind of quiet that means he’s already three steps ahead of me.
Two cups of coffee later and four trips to the front door with still no flowers, I decide to get some fresh air, leaving Ian a note saying I’ll be back in twenty.
The street outside is cool and bright, the kind of Paris morning that looks exactly like a postcard and smells like diesel and bread and the faint sweetness of something blooming in a window box two floors up.
I pull my coat tighter and walk the four blocks with my hands in my pockets, telling myself I’m getting pastries because I’m hungry and not because I cannot sit alone in that apartment with my own thoughts for one more minute.
The bakery is warm and loud in the way small French bakeries are loud—the sound of trays and voices and the hiss of something hitting a hot surface.
I order in my increasingly functional French, receive two croissants and a pain au chocolat and the bakery owner’s polite correction of exactly one vowel, and turn back toward the street.
That’s when I feel it.
A quality in the air behind me, pressing against my spine like a palm that isn’t there. A weight that doesn’t belong to the foot traffic and the morning noise. Familiar in a way I can’t place, like a word in a language I learned young and haven’t spoken in months.
I slow without meaning to. Turn, casually, the way you turn when you’re checking for a gap in the traffic.
The street is ordinary. A woman with a stroller. An old man with a baguette under his arm. Two tourists consulting a map with matching expressions of optimistic confusion.
Nothing.
My pulse stutters, then surges as I stand there for one more second, pastry bag warm in my hands, pulse doing something unnecessary.
I can’t deny the fact that I wish it was him.
And for a moment I imagine it is him. That he’s watching me from a distance.
Or maybe he’s right behind me, and my skin prickles like he’s standing inches away breathing steadily against the back of my neck.
I don’t want to turn. Because if I do—if I look and there’s nothing there—it’ll crush me more than the absence of his flowers. And if there is something…
God, I can’t think of that.
Without turning, I walk back to the apartment, that familiar feeling never leaving me. But I refuse to look around. I refuse to search for a ghost I’m not even sure is there.
The elevator chimes as steel doors open, and my heart sinks to the soles of my feet when I see an empty hallway in front of the apartment door. The flowers have never arrived this late.
Ian is sitting at the counter when I walk in, note in hand, and the expression on his face stops me in the doorway.
No smirk, no eyebrow cocked in judgment, no dry commentary.
This is something else. Something stripped back and direct, the expression he gets when he’s decided to stop being Ian for a minute and just be honest.
“You left without me.”
I place the bakery bag on the counter. “I went four blocks, Ian. In broad daylight. To a bakery I've been to a hundred times.”
“You left. Without me.” He sets the note down flat, deliberate, like he's setting down something heavier than paper. “Four blocks. A parking lot. The elevator. It doesn't matter. The distance is not the point.”
“I left you a note.”
“A note.” He repeats it the way you repeat something when you want the other person to hear how it sounds. “You left me a note.”
“I didn't want to wake you. You needed the sleep—”
“Sophia.” Just my name. Flat and final, the way he almost never uses it.
“If something had happened to you while I was asleep—” He stops.
Looks away for a second, jaw tight, and when he looks back, the armor is completely gone.
Just him. Just the thing underneath all the jokes and the deflection and the easy grin.
“I made Reth a promise. You understand what that means to me. What it would cost me if I—” He cuts himself off.
Exhales. “You don't get to decide the risk is small enough that I don't need to know. That is not how this works. Not ever.”
I want to argue. I can feel the argument sitting there, reasonable and ready—it was fine, nothing happened, you can't wrap me in cotton wool forever.
But something in his face stops me. The rawness of it.
The fact that he's not performing concern right now, not managing me, not doing the Ian thing where everything is slightly ironic and nothing costs him anything.
This is costing him something.
“Okay,” I say. Quietly. “You're right.”
He holds my eyes, making sure it lands all the way down. “Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He keeps my gaze for another moment, then takes the pain au chocolat from the bag without asking and bites into it, and just like that, the armor is back, the easy grin sliding into place like it was never gone.
But I saw underneath it. That’s the thing about Ian—you only get the real version in flashes, and only if you’re paying attention.
“The flowers didn’t come,” I say.
He looks at me. “It’s not even eleven.”
“They’re always here by eight.”
“Crazy.” He breaks off another piece of pastry. “It’s not even eleven.”
I know he’s right. I know it. I drink my coffee and eat my croissant and I know it, and the knowing does absolutely nothing about the cold feeling in my chest that has been there since I opened the door this morning and found the hallway empty.
By five o'clock, the flowers still haven't come.
I've checked the door ten times. I've been reasonable about it—spacing the checks out, not hovering, telling myself each time that there's still daylight, still time, still a hundred explanations that have nothing to do with the worst ones.
The delivery is late. The florist had a problem. He's busy. He's okay. He's okay.
Ian finds me sitting on the balcony with a glass of wine I'm not drinking, staring at the Tower like it owes me an answer.
He pulls the other chair close and sits without saying anything for a minute. Just being there the way he does—steady and unhurried, the particular comfort of a presence that doesn't require performance.
“There'll be a reason,” he says finally.
“I know.” My voice comes out smaller than I want it to.
“He's okay.”
“You don't know that.”
“No,” he admits. “But I know him. And him going quiet doesn't mean what you're afraid it means.”
I press my lips together and look at the Tower and don't say any of the things crawling up my throat. “I just…I need to be alone for a while.”
“Not a chance, Crazy. I know how your hyperactive little mind works, and right now there’s nothing good going on up there. So this is what’s going to happen.” He cocks a brow. “There’s a new club that opened by the river. And I happen to know a guy who knows a guy who can get us in.”
“Ian—”
“Not a discussion, Crazy. You've been sitting with this all day and it's eating you alive. You need noise and movement and something to do with your hands that isn't checking the door.”
“What I need is him.”