Chapter 17
RETH
Flashback
I’m on the street by six. Different position, different coat—adjustments that happen without thought when you’ve been doing it for so long.
By nine, I know something’s wrong. Sophia Sinclair has a shape to her mornings. Like water finding its path—not programmed, but flowing the same way each time because that’s the shape her life has carved into the days.
Every day, she’s out by seven-thirty. Always. I know this the way I know her coffee order and her deadlines and the specific playlist she puts on when she’s writing case notes—not because I chose to learn it. Because I was paying attention. I always pay attention when it comes to her.
It’s ten a.m. and there’s still nothing. The curtains on her apartment windows are still closed, and if I hadn’t seen her arrive home last night, I’d think she didn’t spend the night there. But I know for a fact she’s in there.
Worry’s already slithering up my spine, and I don’t like it.
I’ve always only worried about one person, but I’ve learned to control it, knowing nothing would happen as long as I do my part.
But this is different. Sophia’s different.
The kind of different that gets under your skin and stays there, making you do stupid shit like standing on a freezing street for hours in the morning because she didn’t walk out her front door at the usual time.
Something’s crushing my ribs from the inside. My jaw’s locked so hard it aches. I keep telling myself it’s nothing—just a late start, just a bad night—but the longer the door stays closed, the louder the wrongness gets.
I reposition twice. Watch her building’s entrance with the quality of attention I reserve for targets—exits mapped, variables tracked, the slow accumulating picture of an environment withholding something. There’s no movement, no shadow, nothing.
I go into the building, take the stairs to her floor, and stand outside her door, straining to catch even the faintest sound from the other side. I can’t hear a thing, no movement, no humming—she always fucking hums.
The silence is wrong. Too heavy. Too complete.
My hand twitches at my side, fingers already remembering the shape of her lock.
Eleven seconds. That’s all it would take.
I could be in there, making sure the apartment is empty of threats, making sure she’s still inside and breathing like she’s supposed to be.
The thought sits in my gut like acid. I’ve broken into a hundred places without hesitation.
I’ve stood in rooms while people slept three feet away and never once felt this…
this fucking pull. This need to know she’s okay that’s starting to feel bigger than any job. Bigger than control. Bigger than me.
I force myself to turn away. Each step down the stairs feels like dragging chains. The burn in my chest grows hotter with every floor I descend. What if something happened? What if she’s alone in there and needs help? The questions keep coming, uninvited, ugly, and I hate how much they matter.
By the time I hit the street, the decision is already made.
I find a kid on the steps across the road. Twelve, maybe thirteen. Phone in his hands, the boneless patience of someone with nowhere to be. I give him twenty dollars and the simplest instructions I can manage.
“Knock on 3C. Tell her you’re looking for apartment 3B and got the floors mixed up. Ask if she knows where 3B is. That’s all. Then come back and tell me what she says and how she looks.”
He looks at me like I’m crazy. I probably am.
Nine minutes later, he’s back with his hands in his pockets and an expression like he’s seen something he didn’t sign up for.
“She answered,” he says. “She looks like fucking shit.”
“Watch your mouth, kid.”
He scrunches his nose. “You’re not my mom.”
“What did she say?”
“Who? My mom?”
I wipe a palm down my face. “No. The woman in 3C.”
There’s a glint in his eyes, one I instantly recognize as he holds out his hand. “That’ll be an extra twenty bucks.”
I press my tongue against the inside of my cheek, then reluctantly hand him another twenty. “There, you little menace.”
He shoots me a smug look. “She’s got the flu,” he says then bolts down the road.
The flu? Sophia’s got the fucking flu? I stand on the pavement with the words and don’t know what to do with them. Of course it’s something so human, so normal, so unworthy of the panic clutching my spine.
I shove my hands deep in my pockets and walk, not really registering where I’m heading.
My thoughts are all wrapped up in that woman in apartment 3C, and I just can’t get the picture of her out of my head, lying in bed, probably with a fever, body aches, feeling like shit. No one to take care of her.
Why do I even fucking care about—
I bite down hard, not letting the question form. But the answer is already bruised across my teeth. Because it’s her. Sophia. The woman who’s been at the edges of my mind for too long.
The subtle spring chill bites through my jeans as I continue walking, letting the city’s filth and friction grind the edges off my mood. It should be simple—Sophia being sick. File-able. Irrelevant. Not my concern.
It isn’t.
After walking for fuck knows how long, I eventually end up at my apartment. It’s not too far from hers—two blocks, to be exact.
The door has no peephole, no number, no nameplate. Just a keypad I change every twenty-eight days. I punch in the current sequence and step inside, noting I’ll need a new code in six days.
The deadbolt clicks open with the precision of a gun being cocked, and the door swings open silently. My boots echo against concrete as I step inside, the sound bouncing off bare walls, the narrow hallway lit by recessed LED strips that run the length of the ceiling.
Eight steps to the end of the hallway and into the living space.
There are no rugs, no art, no mail on the side table because there is no fucking side table.
This is not a home. It’s a box I settle into whenever needed.
Every apartment, every penthouse, every goddamn hotel room around the world is nothing but a pit stop on my way to hell.
Every inch of this place is deliberate. No clutter. No decoration. No trace of personality. It’s a vault. A place designed to contain a life that has no room for anything that can’t be replaced, repaired, or discarded.
A thin mattress lies in the center of the living room floor. One pillow and a black sheet folded military-tight. I sleep there when I sleep at all. The bedroom stays empty. Door closed. Unused. A room I don’t need and don’t enter.
I drop my coat on the only chair. Sit. Stare at the wall.
The quiet swallows everything. Thick. Engineered. No traffic hum, no neighbor noise, no echo of footsteps in the hallway. Just the low buzz of the fridge compressor and my own pulse knocking against my eardrums like someone trapped inside trying to get out.
I lean forward, elbows on my knees, and the chair leather creaks under my weight.
My hands hang loose between my legs. They should be steady.
They’re always steady. I’ve had them steady while I cut throats, while I wired explosives, while I watched someone bleed out two feet away and timed how long it took.
But right now, my left thumb is tapping the side of my knuckle.
One-two. One-two. Like a metronome counting seconds I don’t want to count.
This feeling? I don’t like it. It starts in my chest, and it doesn’t stay there—it moves, spreads, gets into my jaw and my hands and the specific way I’m sitting in this chair like I’m about to get up… except I don’t.
The image of a sick Sophia loops behind my eyes.
What if the fever spikes? What if she’s too weak to get water? What if she’s lying on the bathroom floor right now, phone out of reach, breathing shallow, waiting for someone who isn’t coming?
“Shit.” I rake my fingers through my hair, lean back in the chair, and stare up at the ceiling. My pulse climbs like a gauge creeping into the red. I can feel it in my throat now, thick and hot, and it’s sliding into bone without permission.
I stand. Pace. Three steps to the window, three back.
She’s alone up there. No roommate. No boyfriend.
Her mom’s dead. Her father doesn’t even know she exists.
It’s just her, the flu, and whatever medicine she has left in the cabinet—if she even made it to the cabinet.
My mind keeps supplying images I don’t want.
Her curled on the bathroom tile, shivering, too dizzy to stand.
Her phone dead on the nightstand because she forgot to charge it.
Her breathing getting shallower. Slower.
She’s sick and she’s alone and she’s in a building two blocks away burning up with a flu that nobody knows about except a twelve-year-old I paid forty bucks and me, and I’m sitting here.
The coal in my chest ignites. Heat spreads under my ribs, up my throat, behind my eyes.
My vision tunnels for a second, and I grip the windowsill until my knuckles bleach white.
I shouldn’t care this much. I shouldn’t care at all.
But the thought of her alone, burning up, no one to check her temperature, no one to bring her water, no one to—
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
I turn away from the window so fast the room tilts. My hand goes to the back of my neck, fingers digging into muscle, trying to squeeze the pressure out. It doesn’t work. Nothing works.
I pace again. Faster.
What if something happens to her? You hear about people dying of the flu every fucking day. What if her immune system is compromised? What if there’s some underlying health issue I’m not aware of? Who’s her doctor, anyway? What if she takes the wrong combo of medicine?