Chapter 22
SOPHIA
The market is beautiful and vibrant, buzzing with tourists and locals.
Narrow stone streets, canvas awnings in faded colors, stalls of tomatoes and olives and honey and dried herbs that smell like the hillside they came from. Old women arguing prices in Greek. Cats sleeping on walls. The sea visible at the end of every street.
It took me an hour to convince the guys.
Reth refused with a silence that means the answer is no and he's already moved on to the next thing and expects the conversation to do the same. Ian refused with a list of reasons long enough that I stopped listening after ‘If we get mobbed, it’ll be your fault, and your stalker will probably kill half the town—and can you please not wear that dress again because I’m not equipped for the consequences.
And by consequences, I mean the human karambit over there stabbing people and I'll have to help bury them.’
And now here we are, and I’m wearing the dress.
Ian has been here approximately three minutes and has already found someone to argue with about cheese.
"This is a travesty," he says, holding up a wedge of something and examining it with the expression of a man who has been personally wronged. "This is not aged properly. You can tell by the texture."
"You cannot tell by the texture," I say.
"I absolutely can. Feel this." He thrusts it toward me.
"I'm not feeling your cheese, Ian."
"It's not my cheese. That's the problem. This man is trying to sell me inferior cheese."
The stall owner watches this exchange with the philosophical patience of someone who has been selling cheese on this island for forty years and has seen everything.
Reth walks slightly ahead of us. Never far ahead — never more than a few feet — but always scanning. The buff is down today, and I notice the wary glances he draws.
Not hostile. Just… aware. The way people become aware of something that doesn’t quite belong.
He’s too still for a place built on constant movement.
Too watchful in a crowd that isn’t watching anything at all.
Women glance at him and look away quickly, the way you do when something dangerous registers before your brain can name it.
Men clock him and suddenly find somewhere else to be.
A boy stares openly the way children stare at things adults have learned to pretend they haven't seen.
He moves through all of it completely untouched by it.
Ian appears at my shoulder. “You’re staring.”
“I’m observing.”
“That’s what stalkers say.”
“I’m not the stalker in this relationship.”
Ian makes a low sound — almost a laugh. “Fair point.”
Before I can reply, Reth glances back over his shoulder.
His eyes find mine instantly, like he always knows exactly where I am. For a second, he just looks at me — that winter-blue stare cutting straight through the noise of the market — then turns back to the crowd like nothing happened.
But only for a heartbeat.
He pivots, moving with that lethal grace that still makes my stomach flip, and suddenly he’s right in front of me. Towering. Close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his gaze. The rest of the world fades to a dull hum.
He leans in. Close enough that if either of us moves even a fraction, we’d be kissing in the middle of this crowded market like we’re the only two people left alive.
“You’re analyzing me.” His eyes drop to my mouth then drag back up, dark and hungry.
“I’m watching you.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“Then tell me how it works.”
His hand slides around the back of my neck, fingers threading into my hair, holding me exactly where he wants me, thumb stroking the side of my throat, right over my racing pulse. Eyes burn into mine with that terrifying, beautiful intensity that makes me feel completely owned.
“Keep watching,” he says softly, dangerously. “See what happens.”
He nips my bottom lip — sharp, possessive. Then he pulls away just enough to leave me aching, turns, and continues walking like he didn’t just set my entire body on fire in the middle of the market.
Ian’s still got the cheese in his hand. “You two are going to get us arrested.”
"I want to try the honey.”
"You get eye-fucked for three seconds and suddenly you want honey." He falls into step beside me, cheese still in hand. "I'm going to need therapy. Professional, expensive therapy. The kind with a couch and a wall of diplomas."
"You're fine."
"I'm traumatized." He gestures broadly at the market around us. "There are children here, Sophia."
I take the cheese out of his hand and give it back to the stall owner with an apologetic smile.
"Hey—"
"You weren't going to buy it, anyway."
"I was considering it."
"You've been considering it for twenty minutes."
Ian opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at Reth's back ahead of us. "He bit you," he remarks. "In public. In a market. In Greece."
"Ian."
"I'm just noting it for the record."
Ian buys bread he claims is the best thing he's ever put in his mouth and makes me try it, and it is actually extraordinary.
Reth stops at a stall selling local wine and exchanges a few words with the vendor in what sounds like functional Greek.
I watch him do this, one hand loose at his side — and feel the complicated tenderness of loving someone in all their contradictions.
Ian appears at my shoulder. "He speaks seven languages," he says quietly, following my gaze. "Eight if you count the one he made up to confuse Andrei."
We’re standing at the honey stall together when I feel the shift in Reth.
His right hand drops from his side in one small, controlled motion — sliding closer to the inside of his jacket. Most people wouldn’t notice. I do. That tiny movement means the world just became dangerous.
Still facing the rows of golden jars, still pretending to listen to the vendor, his eyes sharpen. He’s tracking something to our left in the reflection of a polished copper tray hanging on the stall wall. Every muscle in his back has gone predator-still.
My pulse spikes, breath caught in my throat when I notice a man walking toward us.
Middle-aged. Plain. Forgettable. Except for the way he’s staring at me.
His hand is already inside his jacket, eyes flat and purposeful.
Six feet away. Then five. Moving sideways through the crowd like he belongs there.
Reth moves like death wearing skin. He slips between a woman carrying baskets and a man unloading crates, sliding through a gap so narrow it should have slowed him.
The crowd parts around him without knowing why.
No panic. No noise. Just the lethal grace of something that was built for exactly this.
They disappear between two stalls — into the narrow, shadowed gap between an old stone building and a shuttered shop. Hidden.
It happens in brutal silence while my stomach drops.
I don’t think. I just move — darting after them, heart hammering, fear for him clawing up my throat. Ian hisses my name behind me but I’m already slipping between the stalls, sandals kicking up dust.
I round the corner just in time to see it.
Reth has the man pinned against the rough stone wall.
One powerful forearm is crushed across the stranger’s throat, completely silencing him.
The man’s eyes are bulging, face turning purple, mouth opening in a scream that never comes.
His hand is still twitching toward the knife in his jacket, but Reth’s other hand is already there — twisting the wrist with vicious force until bone snaps.
His face is pure violence. Lips peeled back, eyes black with rage, scar pulled tight over his cheekbone. There’s nothing human left in his expression — only the monster who was built to kill, and right now that monster is furious.
This isn’t the Nazareth who held my hand at dawn. This is the Reth she turned him into.
The karambit appears like it’s always been in his hand, like an extension of himself, and he buries it low between the man’s ribs with a vicious upward thrust, twisting hard as he drives it deeper.
The man jerks violently once, body convulsing against the wall, a wet gurgle dying in his crushed throat.
Reth’s face never changes — cold, feral, almost serene in its brutality — as he watches the light leave the man’s eyes.
He holds him there a second longer, making sure the kill is clean, before he drags the limp body deeper into the shadows between the two old buildings and lets it slump behind a stack of empty crates. From the market side, it’s completely invisible.
When he turns, our eyes meet, and the air leaves my lungs.
Reth is breathing hard, chest rising and falling, karambit still gripped tight in his blood-slick fingers. His eyes are wild. Possessive. Unhinged. Like the kill wasn’t enough. Like the only thing keeping him from tearing the whole island apart is the sight of me standing right in front of him.
There’s blood on his hand. On his shirt. On the blade.
And still, the look he gives me is so raw, so feral, so devoted that my knees nearly buckle.
It’s not just protection. It’s obsession carved into something violent and sacred.
Like he’d slaughter the entire world and lay every corpse at my feet if it meant keeping me safe.
Like I’m the only thing that matters. The only thing that’s ever mattered.
For one endless heartbeat, the narrow alley disappears. The market noise fades. There’s only him — covered in someone else’s blood, staring at me like I’m both his reason for living and his reason for killing.
Ian’s hand closes around my arm from behind, yanking me back. “Walk.”
Reth is already moving in our direction.
My legs move even though my mind is still stuck on the flash of the blade.
Ian steers me through the crowd, firm but calm, while behind us the market keeps breathing — vendors shouting, children laughing, life continuing like a man didn’t just die twenty meters away.