Chapter 23
RETH
Idon’t announce myself.
The first guard at the east gate never even gets the radio to his mouth.
I come up behind him, clamp one hand over his mouth, and drag the karambit across his throat in one clean slice.
The blade opens him ear-to-ear. Wet, gurgling comes from somewhere deep, fingers clawing uselessly at my wrist as his legs kick once, twice, then go limp.
I hold him upright until the last twitch dies, then drop him in a boneless heap.
“Hale, what the fuck…” Dimitri gets three steps farther, already reaching for the intercom when I slam into him.
My forearm crushes his windpipe. He tries to scream — it comes out a strangled wheeze.
I spin him, drive the karambit up under his ribs, and twist hard.
The blade grinds against bone. Blood floods hot over my hand, down my wrist, soaking my sleeve.
His eyes meet mine for one terrified second before I yank the knife free and slit his belly open from navel to sternum.
Intestines spill out in a glistening, ropey tangle, steaming in the cool night air.
He folds, clutching at his own guts, then falls.
“It’s not personal.” I step over him. “It’s for dramatic effect.”
There are three more between the gate and the front door.
These men know me, except the first one who was new.
Was. The ones now standing between me and her are men who have been on the Capello payroll for years.
Men who know what I am, what I do. Men who woke up this morning with plans for the rest of week.
Plans I’m now ruining. A necessary byproduct.
One never sees me coming. I drop from the shadow of the wall, hook my arm around his neck, and drive the karambit straight through the base of his skull. The blade punches through bone with a wet crunch. He drops like a sack of meat.
The next one tries to fight. He swings, lands a glancing blow to my jaw.
I smile — cold, feral — then break his arm at the elbow with a sharp twist. He screams. I bury the karambit in his eye socket, pushing until the hilt kisses his cheekbone.
The scream cuts off mid-note. I rip the blade free in a spray of blood and brain matter.
The last one between me and the door actually gets a shot off but misses by degrees.
I snarl, close the distance, and slam him face-first into the stone pillar.
Cartilage crunches. I yank his head back by the hair and open his throat with two savage slashes — one horizontal, one vertical — until his head is barely attached.
I leave them exactly where they fall. Storm through the front door, dragging blood across her pristine floors with my boots.
The house is quiet inside. Evening light slanting through the tall windows. Everything is cultivated, spotless, peaceful — the kind of peace only a woman who has never once feared what might walk through her front door could afford.
Valeria is about to learn what fear tastes like.
The sitting room door comes open hard enough to hit the wall, and Mary is the first thing I see, standing by the window with a glass of something, mid-sentence, turning at the sound.
For a split second, my plans halt completely.
She's not supposed to be here. Not tonight.
Not in this room. My mind had mapped this encounter a hundred times on the drive over.
Valeria alone, the confrontation, the truth laid bare.
Mary was never in the picture. Mary was supposed to be somewhere safe and unknowing while I burned this part of our lives down.
She looks at me. And her face does the thing it always does when she sees me — that immediate, unguarded relief, like a woman who has been quietly worried and is trying not to show it. My little sister. The tiny bundle of weight in my arms in a hospital room. The reason.
The whole reason.
"Reth — oh, thank God, I've been trying to reach you for—" Then she reads my face, and the relief dies. Her eyes carry the alarm of someone who has known me long enough to understand the difference between the versions of me. "What's wrong? What happened?"
My gaze finds my next victim. Valeria, sitting in a high-backed chair by the fireplace with her legs crossed and a glass of champagne catching the light and an expression on her face that stops me for one cold, clarifying moment.
She's smiling.
Not the smile she performs. Not the warm, patient thing she wields. This is something underneath all of that — small and satisfied, the expression of a woman who has been waiting for a guest she invited and is pleased they arrived on time.
She knew.
She knew I was coming. She knew Mary was here. She arranged it, the same way she arranges everything, three moves ahead, the board already set before I walked through the gate. Mary is in this room because Valeria put her here.
The realization lands cold and absolute and changes nothing about what happens next.
“Mary, where’s Lucas?” I don’t take my eyes off Valeria.
“He’s at home with Samuel. Why?”
I’m across the room in three strides, and my hand snaps around Valeria’s throat like a steel trap.
"Reth!" Mary's glass hits the floor. "Reth, stop! What are you doing?"
I don't stop.
Valeria's hands come up to my wrist, clutching as I drag her ass from the chair. Her eyes find mine and the composure doesn't crack — it adjusts. Becomes something between entertained and interested.
I slam her back against the wall. The champagne glass shatters somewhere to our left, and Mary screams something I don't process.
I drag Valeria forward by the throat, one step, two, and slam her back again.
Harder this time. Her skull hits the wall with a sound that echoes through the room and her eyes go briefly unfocused — the first real crack in the composure, the first moment she looks like something that can be hurt.
"You think this is a game?” I lean in so close she can smell the revenge on my breath. "You think everything is a game.”
"Reth." Mary's hands are on my arm. Shaking. "What the hell is going on? Let go of her!”
“Ask her,” I grind out. “Ask Valeria exactly what the fuck is going on.”
"Reth—" Valeria's voice is measured despite my grip. "Don't."
“Go ahead, Mary. Ask her what’s been going on for the last motherfucking thirteen years.”
Silence.
"Ask her," I say again. "Ask her why every time you wanted to visit me, she made sure I was out of the country. Ask her what I do for her. Ask her what she's been holding over my head since I was a little boy."
"Reth, you're scaring me—"
"Good." My grip tightens. "You should be scared. Not of me. Of her. Of what's been happening in this house while you were living in it."
Valeria’s gaze is etched on mine. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
"We had a deal." My voice is unrecognizable.
Low and flat and stripped of everything except the thing underneath it that has been building since the underground parking garage.
Since the market. Since the plane lifted off with Sophia on it and I stood on a tarmac and watched it go. "We had a fucking deal!"
"We agreed she was untouchable as long as you stayed away. You didn't stay away."
"She needed—"
"I don't care what she needed. What she needs is irrelevant. What matters is you made a choice. I responded to your choice. That's how this works. That's always been how this works."
My grip tightens, and her mouth gapes for air.
"The man in the market," I say. "You sent him."
"I did."
"You sent someone after Sophia."
"I sent someone to her vicinity." She holds my gaze. "There's a difference."
"There’s no difference!"
"He was a street thug, Nazareth." Her voice doesn't change.
"A nobody. A message. I knew he’d never get past you.
He was never going to touch her." She pauses.
"I just needed you to know that I could.” Her fingers curl around my wrist — not fighting, just resting, the way you rest your hand on something that belongs to you.
"I wanted you to know how easy it would be to take her from you. "
The rage is so complete it has stopped feeling like rage and started feeling like something structural. Like the walls of a room I've been locked in my whole life finally deciding to come down.
"You were playing with me.”
"I'm always playing with you." She almost sounds fond. "That's what we do, you and I. You know this." Her thumb moves across the back of my hand. "And you look extraordinary when you're furious. You always have."
I lean closer. Until my face is inches from hers. Until she can see exactly what's in my eyes and understand that this version of me is not something she can manage with patience and champagne and silk.
"Valeria." Rowan's voice from the doorway.
“Thank God, Rowan. Tell my brother to let go of her.”
I can hear the panic in Mary’s voice. The fear. It should be doing something to my insides, but it’s just fusing into a cold, steady line, sharp enough to cut through stone.
He doesn’t take his eyes off his wife. "Was the Greece operation yours?"
Valeria turns her head as much as my fingers around her throat allow. Looks at her husband with the unhurried assessment of a woman who has been managing this man for decades and is deciding how much of the truth to offer.
"Everything I do is mine, darling.”
Something moves across Rowan's face. Gone before it can be named.
He looks at me — one beat, two — and I understand in that moment that he didn't know. That Lemnos was Valeria operating outside whatever boundaries exist between them. That she's been going further than even Rowan sanctioned.
He steps fully into the room. Doesn't call for help. Doesn't reach for a phone. Doesn't do anything except stand there with his hands in his pockets and his face completely composed, the expression of a man watching something he expected to see eventually and has been patient about.
"Nazareth." His voice is even. "Perhaps—"
"Don't manage this, Rowan. Not tonight."
A pause. "The guards you didn’t slaughter will need to be dealt with."
"Then deal with them."
Another pause. Longer this time. I can feel him reading the room the way he always does — calculating, cataloguing, deciding which variables he can use and which he needs to wait on.
"Let her breathe, Nazareth," he says quietly. "There are things that need to be said, and she can't say them unconscious."
I don't let go.
My fingers stay locked around her throat, and I feel her pulse under them — steady, unlike someone who’s genuinely afraid — and the rage in my chest burns clean and cold and completely without resolution because I want to. I want to finish it.
"Nazareth." Rowan's voice remains even. But there’s something underneath it I’ve only ever heard during training. During the hours he was turning me into the weapon they needed. "Don't force my hand."
I look at him. There’s the slight easing back of his jacket, the glint of a gun, and Mary right in his line of sight. The threat’s there, in the silence.
My fingers burn. My insides are singing with the urge.
One motion. That's all it would take. Thirteen years of wanting this. Thirteen years of running the calculation and arriving at not yet and walking back into her house anyway, and she's right here, right now.
But Mary is standing three feet behind me with Rowan's gun angled precisely enough that I understand exactly what he's telling me.
Not I'll shoot you. That's not the threat.
The threat is the line of sight. The angle.
The cold knowledge of a man who has spent decades understanding that the most effective leverage is never the target themselves.
It's the person standing beside them.
One motion, and I end Valeria.
One motion, and Rowan makes a decision I can't undo.