Chapter 20
SOPHIA
Glass walls. Mountain air. The sound of something shattering that I feel before I hear.
He's there. Standing in the middle of the room with blood on his hands and the karambit loose in his grip and his eyes on mine — blue and open his. The eyes I know. The ones that found me and never quite looked away.
Come here, I try to say. My mouth doesn't work.
Something shifts.
Not all at once. The way ice cracks — a sound first, barely there, then the fracture spreading before you understand what's happening.
His face changes by degrees. His jaw. The set of his mouth.
His eyes going darker, then darker still, the winter-blue draining out of them like color bleeding from a photograph left too long in the sun.
I reach for him.
He looks at my outstretched hand like he doesn't know what it is.
Nazareth—
His mouth moves. The voice that comes out isn't his.
It's a woman’s, coming from his throat — soft and warm and patient and completely without mercy — and something in my chest tears open at the wrongness of it, the specific horror of the person you love most becoming the vehicle for the thing that's destroying them.
His face keeps changing.
The scar splits differently now. Wider. Wrong.
Rearranging itself across features I no longer recognize.
I know the architecture of his face better than I know my own — I've traced it in the dark, memorized it by feel, mapped every line and angle — and watching it become something I can't name is worse than any violence.
Worse than the blood. Worse than the karambit.
He's looking at me and nobody's home.
Reth. I'm screaming it now. I can feel myself screaming it. Reth, look at me. It's me. Look at me.
His head tilts. Slowly. The way a stranger tilts their head at something they don't understand.
He raises the karambit.
No—
The lights go out. One by one. Room by room. The glass walls go dark and the mountain outside disappears and I'm running toward him through nothing, through absolute black, reaching for a face I can no longer see, screaming a name into a silence that swallows it.
My hands find his chest. But then he’s gone. Just cold air where he was. Just the annihilating emptiness of a space that held something precious and doesn't anymore.
I claw at it. Both hands. Trying to find the edges of him, the shape of him, anything.
Nazareth—
Sophia…
I need you to wake up for me, okay?
Nazareth?
Open your eyes, Crazy.
Ian.
My eyes snap open on a gasp that scrapes my throat raw. The nightmare fractures and falls away, but the terror clings like wet silk to my skin. I’m in the villa. Greece. Moonlight slicing through half-open shutters, my heart still trying to claw its way out of my chest.
Ian is crouched beside the bed, one knee on the floor, his face close enough that I can see the worry etched between his brows.
His hand is warm on my shoulder, steady in that way only he ever manages when the dark gets too loud.
I reach for him without thinking, fingers wrapping around his wrist like it’s muscle memory.
“Ian…” My voice cracks.
“You’re safe,” he murmurs, low and calm, the same tone he used on every bad night. “Just a dream. Breathe with me.”
I do. In. Out. Matching the slow rise and fall of his chest until the room stops spinning. Sweat cools on my neck. The sound of my pulse in my ears fades enough to let other sounds in, ocean hissing outside. He doesn’t let go of my shoulder, not until I unclench my hand.
Only then do I look past him.
Reth stands by the window, half swallowed by shadow. The moonlight catches the sharp line of his jaw, the edge of his scar, the rigid tension in his shoulders, but the rest of him is dark, like he’s been carved out of the night itself and left there to bleed.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. He’s just… watching. Looking at me like he’s lost me.
Ian follows my gaze, then gives my shoulder one last gentle squeeze. “You good?”
I nod, even though I’m not sure I am.
He stands slowly, reluctant, like he hates leaving me in this room with all the tension thickening the air. “I’ll be down the hall if you need me.”
For a single heartbeat, as he turns to the door, the two men look at each other. Reth’s stare is cold fire. Ian’s is steady, unreadable. There’s no challenge in it. No triumph. Just quiet understanding and something heavier underneath—something that makes my chest ache.
Then Ian slips out, closing the door behind him with a soft click that feels louder than it should.
The room shrinks. The moonlight feels colder. And Reth still hasn’t moved from the window.
I sit up slowly, sheets pooling at my waist. It’s Reth I can’t look away from—the way he stands there, moonlight painting silver edges along his bare shoulders and the hard line of his jaw. He looks like a man watching something precious slip through his fingers.
“Reth,” I whisper.
He flinches at the sound of his name. Just barely. But I see it.
I slide my legs over the edge of the bed and stand, the cool tile biting my bare feet.
My nightshirt clings to my damp skin as I cross the room toward him.
He doesn’t meet me halfway. He just watches, eyes that were winter-blue now storm-dark, chest rising and falling like he’s fighting not to shatter.
When I reach him, I don’t hesitate. I press my palms to his chest, feeling the thunder of his heart under my hands. He’s burning up. “What’s wrong?”
His hands stay fisted at his sides for one painful second longer.
“I couldn’t wake you.” Then they snap up—rough, desperate—gripping my waist like he’s afraid I’ll disappear if he doesn’t hold on tight enough.
He yanks me against him, hard enough that I gasp.
His forehead drops to mine, breath ragged and hot against my lips.
“I tried. I was right here and I couldn’t fucking reach you. But he could.”
I slide my hands up, cupping his scarred face, thumbs brushing the raised line I know better than my own heartbeat. “I woke up because I heard your name in the dark. I was screaming for you.”
His grip tightens, fingers digging into my hips. For a moment, I think he might kiss me—devour me, punish me, remind both of us who I belong to. But he just breathes me in, shaky and uneven, like he’s memorizing the feel of me before the world takes me away.
He lowers his mouth to mine, kisses me. Barely. A mere brush of lips, like air or a whisper. When he cups my cheeks, I hear him inhale, his shoulders tensing. “Your nightmares…it’s because of me.”
“No. It’s because of her. Because you go back to her.”
There’s a low groan in his throat, something between anger and ache. And he’s vibrating, tense and wired almost to breaking, and for half a second, I think he might just shatter in real time—all that beautiful control reduced to shards in my hands.
“I don’t have a choice, Sophia.”
“I know that.”
His voice is shredded, barely human. “I never should have followed you.”
“Don’t—”
“I should have walked away.”
“Stop.” I press my forehead against his lips, eyes shut. “This isn’t your fault.”
“Jesus Christ.” He lets go of me, and the loss is instant. Like a blade under my ribs. The distance he puts between us is more than I can handle, but I give it to him. Step back, too. Let the space stretch.
“All I did was bring someone as evil as her into your life. Because of me, you’re forced to deal with someone like her, someone who doesn’t deserve to breathe in a world where you are.”
“Reth—”
“All I’ve done is make you cry. Make you wait. Give you something you'll spend the rest of your life trying to recover from when it's over."
I watch him, recognize it. The ruinous spiral.
The all-or-nothing thinking. The way pain rewrites history until every good thing becomes evidence of damage.
I’ve heard this monologue before, from different mouths, in different rooms, and I know what it means when someone speaks about themselves in the language of pure cost.
“In the mountain house,” he continues, “I hated myself for dragging you into this. I hated that your life was in danger because of me.”
I remain silent, arms wrapped around myself as he settles against the wall on the opposite side of the room.
“But then I started hoping.” Drags a hand through his hair. “I allowed myself to think of you and a future and a life where you’re actually in it, and I lost sight of what I actually did to you. What I cost you.”
The words hang between us, heavy and poisoned.
“My cock in your mouth made me forget.” His voice drops to something guttural, almost cruel to himself. “Fucking you made me forget. Loving you like I have a right to… made. Me. Forget.”
“Don’t do that,” I say, taking a step. “Don’t shrink what we have to a ledger of damages just so you can feel like you’re hurting me less. I’m not some collateral. I’m here because I chose it. I’m here because I want it.”
“I kidnapped you, for Christ’s sake.”
“And the door was open,” I say aloud. “That door was open, and I could have run. I could have escaped, but I didn’t.”
Reth stills, eyes flicking to my face, confusion etched across hard lines.
“The day Andrei dragged you into that house. When they took you upstairs, the front door was open. The car was parked right outside, keys still in it. I could have escaped. I wanted to. But when I stood in that doorway, I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t get myself to step out of that house, and I knew I had to stay so I could figure out why. ”
He stares at me. Not the way he stares when he's calculating.
This is different. This is a man who has just had a piece of his own narrative handed back to him rewritten and doesn't know what to do with it yet.
The confusion on his face is real and unguarded and slightly wrecked — the expression of someone who built an entire architecture of guilt around a story he thought he knew and has just been shown a door he didn't know existed.