Chapter 24
RETH
My sister is the reason my hand won't move. She’s always been the reason my hand won't move. Still the leash. Even now. Even here. Even with Valeria's throat marked from my fingers.
I curse as I let go of her, snarling under my breath with enough hate to spit blood. Valeria gasps, coughs, her hands on her throat. Mary scrambles to her, frantic. “Valeria, are you okay?”
I step back, feeling the imprint of Valeria’s throat on my fingers, the ghost of the kill command that never came.
"Besides.” Rowan steps in next to me, eyes kept on Valeria. “If anyone is going to kill my wife… it will be me."
Valeria makes a sound. Low. Amused. Her fingers still on her neck. "Always a romantic, husband."
“I’ll leave you three to it.” Rowan moves toward the door like he already got what he came for and is leaving the rest to settle on its own. He pauses at the threshold. Doesn't look at Valeria. He looks at Mary. “You have much to discuss.”
One beat. Two. A look that contains something I can't fully read. And when I turn to Mary, she's staring at Rowan, too.
Something fires in my chest. Instinct. A signal that tells me when a room has changed before I can identify how. The same signal that has kept me alive in more places than I can name, where the threat found the air before it found a face.
I don't know what I'm reading. I just know something’s wrong.
Then he's gone, and the door closes behind him.
Mary is still beside Valeria, one hand on her arm, tears already streaming down her face. She looks at me and then away and then back again and I can see it happening — the thing I've watched happen in other people a hundred times, the internal collapse of someone whose architecture is giving way.
“Do you love her?” Mary moves from Valeria, takes a step toward me. “This…Sophia. Do you love her?”
It’s the only question that could slow my thoughts, my rage. One question, and I feel the whole engine of me stall somewhere between one breath and the next.
“Yes.” The admission of ultimate vulnerability. The kind you can’t unsay. It just stands there, between you and the people who heard it, like a wild animal. Beautiful, incomprehensible, and sharp with its own teeth.
Valeria watches me, even now, with her ruined neck. I try not to look at her, but it's impossible not to. It's a compulsion, like the wound inside me wants to keep staring at whatever hurt it in the first place.
Mary closes her eyes. One tear. Then another. Then the kind that doesn’t stop.
Something shifts. Something I don't like. Then she crosses the room and runs into my arms.
I don't move. Don't reach for her. Just stand there while she crashes into my chest and her hands fist in my shirt and she cries the way she used to cry when we were children — before this house, before all of it — with her whole body.
My arms come up slowly. I don't decide to hold her.
I just do. Muscle memory older than anything Valeria built in me.
Older than the karambit and the marks on my arms and years of becoming something I don't recognize. It’s the little boy's arms remembering what they were for before they learned everything else.
“I’m so sorry, Reth.”
I press my lips to the top of her head. Hold her. Eyes fixed on Valeria’s face wearing an expression I’ve never seen before.
For the first time in thirteen years of knowing this woman — in every basement, with every man, every job, every room designed to unmake me — the composure has slipped entirely.
“Mary,” Valeria warns.
My sister steps back, pivots to face her. “You promised me you’d never hurt him again.”
Again?
“Mary, don’t be a fool.”
“You promised.”
“Does he look hurt to you?”
“Yes,” she snaps, cheeks glistening. “He’s finally found someone who can make him happy, but you’re keeping him away from her.”
Cold slithers through my bones. “Mary—”
“He hardly knows her. I'm protecting him from himself. From making a mistake.”
“I’m the one who made a mistake by trusting you.”
I run the calculation. I always run the calculation. And for the first time, I don't know what I'm trying to solve.
Valeria steps closer, eyes narrowed. “I gave you everything. Gave you a home. A husband. A bank account large enough for you to not work a single day in your goddamn life.”
"Mary." My voice comes out strange.
“You swore to me—”
“Mary!”
She stops.
"Look at me."
The silence is deafening.
“Look at me, Mary.”
It’s a slow turn. As if there’s a weight in her head and body that takes effort to move. Her face, the guilt in her eyes, her hands shaking at her sides, I recognize the look. It’s the one she gave me right before she confessed to breaking our mother’s music box.
And I know.
Before she opens her mouth. Before a single word comes out…I know.
"Don't." Valeria's voice cuts across the room. Sharp. "Mary. Don't you say a word."
Mary flinches. But she doesn't stop crying.
"Mary." Valeria again. Lower this time. A warning dressed as softness. "Think about what you're doing."
"I can't—" Mary's voice breaks. Completely. Like something structural giving way. "I can't do this anymore. I can't!"
It starts in my chest, a deep, hollow crack that spreads outward.
My ribs feel too small, too fragile, too fucking useless to contain what’s left of me.
The pressure builds until I can’t breathe, until the air turns sharp and metallic in my lungs, until I’m choking on years of poison I thought was my own blood.
“You knew.” It’s more a breath than a whisper.
Mary looks at me. And she falls apart, the way people do when they’ve been holding something for too long and the body simply stops cooperating.
Great, heaving sobs that shake her whole frame, hands pressed over her mouth like she can contain it. Until her secrets do what all secrets eventually do.
They come out.
“She promised me that it’ll stop.” The words tear out of her between sobs. She tries to breathe. Can't quite. "She swore to me that she’d never hurt you again.”
The room goes completely silent.
My heart doesn't break. It doesn't break because breaking implies something sudden.
This is slower than that. This is the quiet devastation of a foundation you've been standing on your entire life shifting beneath your feet and understanding, with absolute clarity, that it was never solid to begin with.
She knew.
My little sister. The tiny baby in my arms. The thing I've been bleeding for quietly for thirteen years, the thing I handed everything over for, the thing I told myself was worth every mark on my arms and every line and every room and every piece of me Valeria took.
She knew.
"How long?"
Mary looks at me through her tears. The answer is in her face, saying everything she doesn’t have words for.
My mind doesn’t know how to process tears, so my body does the next best thing…ration them to muscle. I feel like all of me could rupture with the effort of not bleeding out in this room.
"I was scared, Reth. And afraid, and I didn’t want to go back to that home. I didn’t want to go back to being an orphan.”
I hear her speak. Hear the words coming out of her mouth. But nothing makes sense. It’s a very distinct thing, to be robbed of a history. To have every moment of sacrifice, every miserable hour of every unendurable day suddenly stopped, rewound, and played again and be completely different.
Mary’s right in front of me now, and she’s got my hands in hers, and I suddenly have no idea who she is. What she is.
“I was a little girl, and I didn't know what to do, and she promised me nothing bad will happen. She swore to me."
"You grew up." My voice doesn’t sound like mine. "You grew up, Mary. You married into this family. You had a son inside these walls." I look at her. "All while knowing what lives here?"
The sob that tears out of her is ugly and enormous. "I know. I'm sorry. But I thought it stopped. It did stop, didn’t it?”
“Only because—” Ice slams into my spine. The cold, hard realization.
“No man will touch you again.”
Rowan. He knew…he knows.
The look he gave Mary before he left the room.
The day he made that promise, was that… was that the day Mary found out? What I thought was mercy…was it even that? Did he save me, or simply stop Mary from talking?
I jerk my hands from hers, my skin, my bones, everything burning like acid. “You lied to me,” I mutter, gaze on the floor, staring at nothing. “You’re all. Fucking. Liars.”
Mary reaches again, desperate, but I step back. She’s shaking, hands out like she’d apologize for oxygen if I told her it was the wrong shape.
“You have to forgive me,” she pleads. “I just…we were alone, Reth. Had nothing, no one—”
“So you chose to stab me in the heart.”
“I chose a life!” she cries. “A life for both of us.”
I laugh—this broken, manic, thing. “For both of us? I died, Mary.”
A sob breaks from her.
“I fucking died in a basement below the floor where you slept!”
“No. No. No—”
“I lost my life,” I spit out. “While you were dressing up, going to parties, to prom, having your fucking wedding, I was ripping out my veins so you could have your fairytale.”
Mary falls to her knees, fingernails scratching the floor, sobbing, the sound making the insides of my skull itch, and it’s obscene, the way I want to comfort her even now, even as she confesses to knowing how many times I died for her, and she never did a thing about it.
"You were the reason," I say, something warm dripping down my cheek. "Everything I did, every person I killed, every piece of myself I handed over, every year of my life I gave to her,” I point at Valeria “I did it for you."
“I'm so sorry. I would give anything—" she gets up on her feet, tries to scramble toward me, “I’ll do anything—”
The wet, sickening sound of metal punching through flesh cuts her off mid-sentence.
A thick iron spike erupts from the front of her throat.
Mary’s eyes blow wide. Her mouth opens in a silent, gurgling scream as the poker spears through her windpipe and tongue, the jagged iron tip glistening red just beneath her chin.
She stays upright for one horrifying second — impaled, trembling, blood pouring down her front in thick sheets — before Valeria gives the poker a vicious twist, and Mary falls.
I stare. I can’t move.
My mind is blank, white noise and static. This isn’t real. This can’t be real. Mary was just reaching for me. She was just talking. She was going to say she was sorry. She was—
“There.” Valeria’s voice cuts through the fog, soft and almost amused. “Much better. She never knew when to shut up.”
I blink.
Once.
Twice.
A crushing weight forces me down on my knees.
The blood keeps spreading. It touches my knee now, warm, soaking into my pants.
For one suspended moment, I’m numb. Veins frozen.
Insides dead. But then it explodes. Pure.
Blinding. Endless. My hand moves, fingers closing around the karambit.
The grip is slick with blood. Theirs? Mine? Hers? I don’t know. I don’t care.
I rise.
Valeria is still standing there in her perfect silk, watching me with that calm, almost fond expression, like I’m a particularly interesting experiment.
I take one step forward, karambit raised, vision tunneled on her throat, and I see how I split it open.
How I tear out her trachea. How I rip her tongue out.
Reach in deep through slippery muscle and cartilage, past everything soft and human, until I close my fist around the rotten core of her.
Until I reach her heart and feel it die in my palm.
I’m already dismembering her in my head, and I scream. Violent, vicious, hollow.
A sharp pinch blooms in the side of my neck. Fast. Clinical. Like a wasp sting, and my hand freezes mid-air. The karambit suddenly weighs a thousand pounds. My knees buckle. The room tilts, colors bleeding together, the edges of my vision going soft and blur.
I fall, Mary’s dead eyes right next to me. My heartbeat is a violent thud between my ears, and when I look at Valeria, her smile widens. Slow. Satisfied. Victorious.
“Welcome home, Nazareth.”