Chapter 10
RETH
Islam the door shut, tear a piece of fabric off my shirt and wrap it around my hand. My phone vibrates against the desk. I don’t need to look at the screen. No one else has this number.
I answer on the second pulse. “What.”
Ian doesn’t waste time. “How’s the hand?”
I glance down at my palm. It aches now that the adrenaline is gone. A dull, persistent throb that my body keeps trying to bring to my attention. I keep ignoring it.
“Superficial.”
“Bullshit.”
I flex my fingers slowly. The skin pulls open slightly along the deepest part of the cut. “It’ll scar.”
“You can’t do shit like that.”
“Like what.”
“Grab a blade with your bare hand in front of her like you’ve got something to prove.”
My jaw tightens before I can stop it. I don’t answer immediately, which is an answer in itself, and we both know it. “You were watching.”
“Yeah.”
The admission sits there. Calm. Unapologetic. Ian has never once pretended to be something he isn’t, which is either his greatest quality or his most infuriating one, depending on the hour.
“I told you not to run feed when I’m inside.”
“You tell me to do a lot of things which I ignore.”
“That’s not how this works. You fucking know that, right?”
A chair scrapes faintly on his end. I picture him leaning back, boots up on something expensive that doesn’t belong to him, a cold cup of coffee somewhere at his elbow. He runs surveillance the way some men fish—patient, unhurried, faintly smug about it.
“You pay me to protect your interests,” he says evenly. “Ignoring you half the time is me doing just that.”
My hand throbs, and I press the cloth tighter. Pain is familiar. Predictable. It goes into a box, gets labeled, shelved. I’ve been doing it since I was old enough to understand that reacting only makes it worse.
“This is different,” I mutter. “With her.” The words come out quieter than I intend. Sharper, too. Like they’ve been sitting behind my teeth long enough to develop an edge.
Something shifts on Ian’s end. The easy sarcasm drains out of his voice, replaced by something more careful. “Believe me,” he says, “I know. Which is why you need someone watching your back now more than ever.”
“You opened the door.”
“Fuck yes, I did.”
The seasons room. Her face in amber light. Head tilted back, throat bared, like she forgot for a moment that she was supposed to be afraid. I built it for no one and told myself that for a long time. She stood under it for ten minutes and made me a liar.
“That room wasn’t for her.”
“You sure about that?”
I don’t answer, and the silence stretches. Ian lets it.
“You overstepped,” I add.
“She was deteriorating.”
“She was fine.”
Ian exhales hard, something between a laugh and disbelief. “She baked enough to feed a militia and sat on the hallway floor talking to a locked door.”
The image lands with uncomfortable precision. I hadn’t been in the room for that. I’d seen it on the feed—her back against the wall, knees pulled up, speaking quietly to the wood like it might eventually get tired of staying shut. I’d watched it for longer than was necessary.
Ian continues, “You isolate someone long enough, they fracture. And fractured people make unpredictable decisions.”
“Stop preaching.”
“A mentally stable Sophia is easier to protect.”
I lean back in the chair, staring at the ceiling.
The room is dark except for the blue-gray light of the monitors across the desk, four screens casting their pale glow across the walls.
The cut in my palm splits slightly as I brace against the armrest. “You don’t get to make executive calls about her. ”
“I do when you stop thinking like a tactician and start thinking like—”
“Finish that fucking sentence.”
He doesn’t.
I shift the phone to my other ear, patience thinning to something close to wire. “Did you take care of it like I asked?”
“Yup.” The shift is immediate—business, clean and efficient. “It’s like he never existed. And for the record? You owe me new boots. And a therapist. Took me hours to bag all that.”
Blood on concrete. The particular sound of a joint separating. His breathing going wet and then—not. He didn’t recognize me. Even if my face weren’t painted, he still wouldn’t have. Men like him don’t look at what isn’t performing for them.
“Fucker had it coming.”
“Most people just shoot a guy,” Ian says dryly. “You dismantled him. Were you trying to send a message, or just working through something?”
“Both.”
No hesitation.
He hums under his breath like he expected that. “How long do we have until she finds out?”
Her timing is always theatrical. Her cruelty always staged for maximum damage. I know this the way I know the layout of a room I was locked in—not because I studied it. Because I had no choice. She’ll want an audience. She’ll want Sophia to hear it in a way that can’t be taken back.
“It was staged,” I mutter into the receiver. “Everything. She wanted me to find out they got to him.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know how her mind works.” She was showing me. Slowly. Deliberately. The way you let a man see the trap before the teeth close. Not mercy. Theater. Every breadcrumb placed just far enough apart that I’d have to work for it.
“She wanted you to know they got to him?”
“No.” I ball my cut fist, ignoring the pain. “She wanted me to know that she got to Sophia.”
It hangs there, loaded, the kind of thing that can’t be unsaid and doesn’t need to be repeated.
Ian lets out a breath. “How long before she knows you took him out?”
“She already knows.”
“You heard from her?”
“No. But just like I know how her mind works, she knows mine too.” There are people you know the way you know a scar, mapped into you whether you chose it or not. She’s that.
“Once she realizes Sophia disappeared off the face of the earth,” Ian continues, “she’s gonna know you took her.”
“I know.”
The words taste like inevitability. Like something I decided before I fully understood it, the way the largest choices always work—not in a moment but over time, accumulating quietly until the weight of them tips into action.
“You ready for that?”
I look at my hand. At the blood I chose not to flinch from, the geography of a decision made in a kitchen over a knife and a woman who looked at the wound like she wanted to fix it. Ready is irrelevant.
“For my own mental health,” Ian mutters, “I’m gonna take that as a yes.”
A beat.
“Reth…”
“Yeah?”
Another stretch. “You can’t protect them both.”
Ian serves that cold, harsh reality check that settles into my bones.
But my stomach doesn’t hollow out. My blood doesn’t run cold.
Because I’m not that thing. I don’t feel.
I don’t react. I calculate. Dissect. I create invisible threads that stretch and loop from a problem to the most probable solution.
Right now, I’m still navigating in which direction I’m threading to.
“Clean the hand. And next time you feel the urge to bleed for dramatic effect—don’t.”
The line clicks dead, and I lower the phone slowly, setting it face-down on the desk. I sit in the dark for a moment, not moving—just letting the silence settle the way it does after Ian, when the conversation stops and the thinking begins. Then I reach forward and wake the monitors.
Four screens. Live feed. The cameras are small—integrated into the architecture, invisible unless you know where to look, and no one who hasn’t installed them would know where to look.
The angles are clean. Overlapping fields of view with no dead zones.
I built redundancy into everything up here. It’s the only way I know how to work.
The top left is the exterior. Snow and dark and the long driveway disappearing into the tree line. Empty.
Top right, the feed splits three ways—hallway one, hallway two, and the seasons room. Every angle of it, including the bench where she sat until the mountains went dark. I built those cameras in before the ceiling. Before the paint. Before I had a reason I was willing to name.
Bottom right, the stairwell and entryway.
Bottom left, the kitchen and living area. She’s in it.
I lean forward slightly.
She moves slowly, the way people move when they think they’re alone—no performance in it, no self-consciousness, just the particular economy of someone doing a task that requires nothing from them. She’s found a cloth from somewhere, and she’s on her knees on the tile, cleaning up the blood.
My blood.
She works methodically. Pressing the cloth flat.
Lifting it. Moving to the next smear. The knife is already gone—she must have dealt with that first. The floor near the counter is dark where the blood pooled, and she goes at it carefully, thoroughly, the way she does things when she cares about the outcome.
She wrings the cloth out over the sink without looking up.
There’s something in the set of her shoulders—not distress or anger. Something quieter than both. Deliberate. Like the cleaning is something she decided to do rather than something that needed doing, and the distinction matters to her even if no one else would notice it.
I watch her longer than is tactically necessary. Then I wrap the cloth tighter around my palm, tighten it until the ache sharpens into something I can use, still watching her.
I think about Dean—about how he walked right past what was going to destroy him—and I understand, for the first time, that I am doing the same thing.
She will come.
We’re now locked in a game both of us excel at. And I just made the first move…by killing Dean.