Chapter 14
SOPHIA
The fireplace has no business being alive in July.
I said this forty minutes ago, right before Reth lit it anyway without a word, and now I'm lying on the living room floor with my head on his chest and the windows cracked and Paris doing its warm summer night thing outside and the fire doing its warm everything thing inside and I find I don't have a single complaint left in my body.
We haven't left this apartment the entire time he’s been here.
It’s been days of his hands and his mouth and the specific, consuming way he looks at me when he thinks I'm not looking back.
Mornings of apple cinnamon muffins, nights of take-out deliveries and sex, and the fireplace in July and the city of love existing somewhere beyond these walls without us in it.
“You know,” I say, tracing an absent pattern on his forearm, “Paris is apparently the most romantic city in the world.”
“Apparently.”
“People come from everywhere. To see it. To be in love in it.”
“Mm.”
“We've seen the ceiling.” I tilt my head back to look at him. “And the kitchen counter. And the shower wall. And the—”
“I know what we've seen.”
“Just making sure you're aware of the cultural experience you're depriving me of.”
The corner of his mouth moves. Almost. “Do you want to go outside?”
I consider this for approximately half a second. “Absolutely not.”
The sound he makes is not quite a laugh but close enough to borrow its warmth. His hand moves to my hair—slow, absentminded, the way he touches me sometimes when he's not thinking about it, when it's just reflex. Just need.
I close my eyes. There's a quality to him that I want to live inside forever.
Not just the hunger, though that's been constant and devastating and I have the marks to prove it.
Something underneath it. Softer and more permanent than want.
The way he keeps looking at me like I'm the only fixed point in a universe that's been moving too fast for too long.
The way his hands find me in the dark not because he needs something but because I'm there and being there is enough, is everything, is the whole answer to a question he stopped knowing how to ask.
I could stay in this exact feeling for the rest of my life.
This warm, firelit, completely ordinary extraordinary thing of being known by someone.
Of being the place a person comes back to.
Of lying on a living room floor in summer with a fire burning for no reason except that he lit it and I didn't complain, and feeling—for the first time in as long as I can remember—like I am exactly where I am supposed to be.
Not safe, exactly. Nothing about him has ever been safe.
But home.
That's the word. That's the feeling I want to live inside forever. Reth is home.
It’s ridiculous, complete madness for me to feel this way, but I do.
I do, and it terrifies me. But what is love if it doesn’t scare you a little?
What is love if it isn’t crazy or reckless?
If it’s a love that has a shape I can fit into a little box, I don’t want it.
I want a love that has the power to tear my heart out.
Even if it means waking up one morning with nothing left.
“You’re thinking very loudly.” His hand travels up my arm.
“You’re not supposed to listen to my thoughts.”
“Hard not to when your whole body changes register.” His thumb traces a slow circle on my shoulder. “You went from relaxed to terrified in about four seconds.”
I lift my head and look at him. “I'm not terrified.”
He looks back at me with that expression—the steady, unhurried one that sees everything and waits for you to catch up to what it already knows.
“You get a small line right here when something scares you.” He touches the space between my brows with one finger. Barely a touch. “And you go very still. Like if you don't move it won't notice you.”
I stare at him.
“You do the same thing when the elevator in this building makes that sound on the third floor.
And when you're reading something that's about to go somewhere you don't want it to go—you stop turning pages and just hold the book.” A pause.
“And when you wake up in the middle of the night and I'm not next to you because I'm standing by the window watching you.
You go still the same way—like if you don't move, whatever's wrong won't find you.”
“You know that?”
“I know everything about you, Cherry-red.” Not arrogant. Just true. The way gravity is true. “I've been paying attention for a long time.”
Something moves through my chest so completely I have to look away.
He knows me the way people only know each other after years of choosing to look.
Except he never got to choose openly. He chose from streets below and darkened doorways, from a diary and a house built from words I wrote alone at midnight.
And he still knows every single thing.
“What was I thinking about?” I ask quietly.
He looks at me for a long moment. “That I frighten you.”
“That’s ridiculous. I’m not scared of you.”
“No.” His eyes don't move from mine. “You're scared because you know I'm going to cost you something.”
I lick my lips, keep his gaze. “Maybe.” A pause. “Ask me if that changes anything.”
I hold his gaze, but he doesn't say anything. Just looks at me with those winter-blue eyes that take everything in and let nothing out, and somehow that is answer enough.
Because he already knows.
He knows it doesn't change anything. He knows I'm here anyway, fully and without reservation, cost and all. He knows because he knows everything about me.
He reaches up and cups my jaw, tilts my face toward his, and kisses me—deep and unhurried, the kind of kiss that has no agenda except this, just this, just him and me and the fire burning in July and Paris outside not knowing it exists.
When he pulls back, his eyes are still closed for a moment. Then they open and find mine, a ghost of a smile appearing on his beautiful face. “You apologize to furniture under your breath when you walk into it.”
I stare at him. “I do not.”
“You do. Yesterday it was the dining chair. Today the coffee table.” A beat. “Twice.”
“That's—” I open my mouth. Close it. “That's completely normal behavior.”
“Yeah.” He smiles wickedly. “Completely normal.”
“Furniture have feelings, too.” I feel the smile breaking through before I can stop it—the real one, the unstoppable one—and he watches it happen with that expression that isn't quite a smile but has given up pretending it isn't trying to be.
“You've been watching me apologize to furniture,” I say.
“I watch everything.”
“That's insane.”
“Not arguing that.”
“You're annoyingly perceptive for someone who barely speaks,” I say.
“I don't need to speak.” He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, unhurried. “I just need to watch you. You say everything without knowing you're saying it.”
“That's deeply unfair.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “It is.” He kisses my cheek and shifts himself up to sit against the couch, the throw draped over his naked lap.
I sit up too, cross my legs, and notice the lines on his arms again as he reaches for his beer.
Lines I’ve asked him about before, at the mountain house.
Lines I’ve concluded means one of…something.
I should ask. Maybe he’ll open up to me, finally.
Say something that’ll help me understand who Reth is when he’s not with me.
I should ask because I'm trained to ask, because sitting with someone's pain without naming it is its own kind of abandonment, because the professional in me knows that silence around the things that mark us only gives them more power.
But I shouldn't ask. Because some things are said in their own time, and forcing them open before they're ready doesn't heal anything—it just exposes the wound to air it wasn't ready for.
Because he's here, warm and present, the firelight doing soft things to his face, and I don't want to be the person who pulls him back into whatever dark place those lines come from.
I look at his arm.
I ask anyway.
“Tell me what they mean.” I keep my voice soft. No pressure in it. Just the question, open, offered rather than demanded. “The lines.”
His jaw shifts, then he looks at the same spot on his arms I’m staring at. For a second, I think he’s not going to answer. Then, “One for each.”
“Of what?”
He swallows. “Each kill.”
I knew. I knew, and knowing doesn't make it land any softer.
I look at the lines. A tally system made of skin instead of numbers. Something his body could keep for him when his mind couldn't.
My fingers find one near his wrist. Newer than the rest—the skin still slightly raised, the scab mostly gone but the pink of new healing still visible. I touch it the way I touch his scar. Like it's something I'm being trusted with.
“The men at the mountain house,” I say. “The night Ian took me.” I look up at him. “Are they on here?”
Something moves through his expression. “No.”
“Why not?”
“I don't count those.” His voice is flat but not cold. “Those weren't hits. Those were men who came to take something that belongs to me.” A pause. “I count my victims. The ones I'm sent for. Not the ones who come for mine.”
The distinction lands somewhere complicated and important in my chest. I look back down at his arm.
There are so many. I don't say it out loud.
I just think it, sitting with the full weight of what I'm looking at—both arms, inner and outer, the lines running in their precise identical rows like something measured and deliberate, which of course they were, which is somehow the most devastating part.
Not frantic. Not chaotic. Deliberate. One for each. A system.
I try to count and stop myself.