Chapter 13
SOPHIA
Ifind him in the seasons room.
Of course I do. It’s like he knew this is where I’d go first thing in the morning. He’s standing at the window with his back to the door, still as architecture, like he’s been there long enough to become part of the room.
I don’t know if he knows I’m here. He probably does, but that doesn’t stop me from watching him. Taking him in.
He’s in black. He’s always in black, like color is something he decided against a long time ago. The fitted shirt he wears does nothing to hide the breadth of his shoulders, a man built not in a gym but by something harder and less voluntary than that.
His back tapers to a narrow waist, dark jeans sitting low on his hips, and I’m aware—uncomfortably, inconveniently aware—that there is nothing soft about him. Nothing incidental. Every hard, toned line is like it’s been carved by purpose, by a commitment that speaks of survival, not vanity.
Sleeves cover his arms, the gauze I wrapped around his hand still in place.
He shifts his weight. Just slightly. A micro-adjustment, the kind of unconscious movement that means he’s been standing in one position long enough that his body is making small corrections.
And I watch it travel through him—through the broad line of his back, the shift of muscle beneath fabric, the way the shirt pulls slightly across his shoulders with the movement—and something low in my stomach responds before I can stop it.
My kidnapper is beautiful the way severe weather is beautiful.
The way standing at the edge of something very high is beautiful.
The kind that makes your body register danger and interest in the same breath, that makes you simultaneously want to step back and lean forward, that has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with being alive.
Reth is, objectively, the most physically overwhelming person I have ever been in a room with.
“You just gonna stand there?” he says without moving.
I step inside, shoulders finding the wall, palms flat against it behind me. “We can’t both love this room.”
There’s a faint sound, almost like a snicker. “Well, I built it, so…”
“For who?”
He doesn’t turn around. Doesn’t move. But something in the set of his shoulders changes. A barely perceptible shift, like a door that was almost closed being pulled slightly more shut.
“For who?” I say it again. Quieter this time. Not letting it go.
Slowly, he turns and looks at me across the amber light of the autumn panel with an expression I can’t fully read above the mask. But his eyes are doing something they don’t usually do. Something that isn’t deflection or control or the practiced blankness he aims at me when I get too close.
“Does it matter?”
“I think it does.”
I look at him. He looks at me. Outside, the mountain is doing whatever mountains do at this hour—existing, indifferent—and in here it’s just the two of us and a thousand questions I need answers for.
“You slept well.” It’s not a question.
I push off the wall. “I did. First time since you took me I actually fucking slept.”
“You were tired.”
“I’ve been tired every night. Last night was different. That room. This house.” I pause. “I want to know.”
“Know what?”
“Why it feels like mine.”
He holds my gaze, and I can see the answers in the blue depths of his eyes. If I can just reach…
“How do you know me, Reth?”
“I don’t.”
“Don’t lie to me. It’s insulting, and you’re smarter than that.” I pull the lollipop from where I tucked it into my sleeve and hold it up between us. “You keep leaving them for me to find. Why?”
He glances at it like it’s insignificant. “In case you get a sugar craving.”
“You might not have noticed, but I’m in no mood for your bullshit this morning.”
Something hardens in his gaze. “If this is what a good night’s rest does to you, feel free to sleep on the fucking floor tonight.”
Despite everything, something in me wants to laugh, but I don’t let it. “You lit the fireplace before I even decided to go upstairs. You knew I would.”
“I hoped you might.”
“Who are you to me?” The question comes out quieter than I intend. “Because you don’t feel like a stranger. You feel like someone who has been on the edges of my life for a long time, and I just couldn’t see you.”
“Sophia—”
“And then there’s that. The way you say my name, like you’ve been saying it for years.
” I watch his profile. The crease between his brows.
The way his eyes pierce through me, like he knows I’m close and wants me to figure it out.
“That’s the thing, isn’t it? You do know me.
Not casually. Not the way you know someone you’ve just met.
The way you know someone you’ve studied. Someone you’ve—”
And then it lands, the full weight of something that’s no longer suspicion, but certainty, arriving all at once, rearranging everything.
His chin lifts slightly, almost imperceptibly, as if he’s been waiting for this penny to drop for a real long time.
“You know I bake when I’m falling apart.” My voice has gone strange. Flat. Clinical. The voice I use when I’m processing something I’m trying to make sense of. “You know my favorite pastry. The flowers I like. The temperature I prefer. Even the bedroom—”
“What about it?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You built that room out of…out of something I can’t explain, but it’s mine, and you knew it would be.” I look at him directly, no longer searching for an answer. “You’ve been watching me.”
He tilts his head to the side, keeping it low, staring at me from under dark lashes. “You’re the expert. You tell me what it is you’re describing.”
I open my mouth. Close it. And he starts moving. Slowly. Deliberately. Each step closing the distance between us and I find myself stepping back without deciding to, my professional brain screaming don’t let him control the geography while the rest of me is very aware of how small this room is.
“Put a label on it, Sophia.” His voice has an edge now. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Label things. Label people. Slot them into neatly arranged categories so you know what your next move should be.”
My back finds the wall. “How long?”
“How long what?” He tilts his head. Waiting. He wants me to say it, but I don’t. Beneath the chills, there’s a flicker of defiance, a piece of me that refuses to play.
“You wanna know how long I’ve been…stalking you?”
The words lands between us like something dropped from a height.
“Years, Sophia. I’ve watched you for years. Your routine. Your rhythm. The way you dress. The way you talk to people. How you chew the inside of your mouth when you’re thinking.”
My stomach hollows out.
“I know how you laugh when you’re trying to pretend something’s funny. How your throat moves while you swallow that first sip of your cinnamon latte.”
My pulse spikes.
“I know how you can’t do something as mundane as laundry without being three steps ahead of yourself, forgetting things.” A pause. “But not when it comes to them.”
“To who?” I choke out, barely a whisper.
“The children.” Something in his voice shifts. Loses the edge. Becomes something rawer underneath. “You soak up their pain like it’s yours, and don’t pay attention to your own life because you’re too caught up in theirs.”
“That’s got nothing to do—”
“You think you’re helping.” He’s close now.
Close enough that I can see the detail of the buff across his face, the particular darkness of the indigo line around the black of his pupils.
“You think you can heal them. Make them whole again. But you can’t.
Nothing can. Their lives are glass, Sophia.
You can try to put it back together, but the cracks?
It’ll always show. Break again under the slightest pressure.
Because you can’t unfuck a life that’s already been destroyed. ”
The room goes very quiet.
Years.
The word drops between us, and my body braces for the hit, stomach dropping, skin crawling, the scream that should already be climbing my throat.
None of it comes.
Because my eyes have already locked on the way his shoulders have gone rigid, coiled like cables under unbearable strain.
His fists are curled so tight the knuckles have bleached white, and every breath he takes looks like it’s carving him open from the inside, costing him something he’ll never get back.
The careful armor he usually wears is cracking right in front of me.
It’s raw and so painfully human, my chest squeezes with a sharp, unexpected ache that steals my breath. I can’t look away.
“What happened to you?”
The question slips out soft and trembling, and the second it does, his pain crashes into me like it belongs to me too.
My heart twists so violently I feel it in my throat—a fierce, aching tenderness I have no right to feel for the man who stole my life.
It drowns everything else, the years he watched me, the fear, the rage.
None of it survives this. All that’s left is this terrifying need to reach him, to pull the broken pieces closer even though I know they’ll cut me.
“The scars on your arm,” I say.
His jaw tightens.
“I know what self-harm looks like.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“I know what it means when someone needs that kind of control over their own body.” I keep my voice level. The voice I use when something fragile is in the room. “Every line. The exact spacing. The identical length. They’re too deliberate to be random. Too consistent.”
“You need to stop.”
I push off the wall, closer. “One per…something. That’s what I think. One per event. One per person. One per—”
“I said stop.”
“Am I wrong?”
His eyes are sharp enough to pierce glass. “You need to leave this alone.”
“I can’t.” And I mean it. Not as a provocation. As a fact. “I’ve sat across from many people who learned to do this to themselves, and I have never once been able to leave it alone because leaving it alone means leaving them alone inside it, and I won’t do that.”
“I’m not your patient.”