Chapter 19
SOPHIA
I’ve lost four hands in a row, and Ian looks insufferably pleased about it.
“You’re telegraphing again. Right here.” He taps the side of his eye with one finger, leaning back in his chair with the ease of someone who has never in his life been uncomfortable anywhere. “Every time you’ve got nothing, you do this thing with your eyes.”
“I don’t do a thing with my eyes.”
“You absolutely do a thing with your eyes.”
I look down at my cards. A three and a seven, mismatched suits, completely useless. I arrange my expression into something I hope is neutral and look back up at him.
He grins. “There it is.”
“That’s not fair. You’ve been doing this for how long?”
“Years.” He smirks and tosses two chips into the center of the coffee table with the casual authority of someone who has already won. “Call or fold, Crazy.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Never. Call…or fold.”
I fold. Obviously, I fold.
Ian rakes the chips toward himself, stacking them with a precision that feels deliberate and slightly irritating.
I pull my knees up onto the couch and study him the way I’ve been studying him for days now.
He’s harder to read than he lets on. The mischief is real, but it sits on top of something else, something older and more careful, and sometimes when he thinks I’m not looking, the mischief goes quiet, and what’s underneath is just… tired.
“You’re doing the therapist thing,” he says without looking up.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re studying me.”
“I’m sitting here.”
“You’re sitting here studiously.” He glances up, green eyes sharp under the easy expression. “It’s unsettling. Stop.”
“Occupational hazard.”
“Mm.” He deals the next hand. Two cards each, sliding them across the low table. “You ever actually turn it off? The noticing?”
I pick up my cards. A queen and a ten. I keep my eyes very still. “Not really.”
“Must be exhausting.”
“You get used to it.”
He studies me for a moment—and there it is again, that flicker underneath, the thing that isn’t mischief—and then his phone buzzes on the table between us.
He glances at the screen, and something in his face changes. Not dramatically. Ian doesn’t do dramatic. But the ease drains out of him the way heat leaves a room when a window opens.
He picks up the phone and stands in one motion, turning slightly away from me.
“Talk,” he barks into the receiver.
I watch his back, the set of his shoulders, the way his free hand drops to his side and closes into a tight fist.
“How bad?”
A pause. His head drops forward an inch.
“Get him here now. No, I can’t leave her.” A beat. “I know it’s a fucking emergency, but I can’t fucking leave her. So get him here now.”
He hangs up and stands there for a second with his back to me.
When he turns around, his expression is controlled in a way it wasn’t before—the kind of controlled that takes effort.
“Ian.” My voice comes out quieter than I intend. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing you need to—”
“Is it Reth?” I uncurl from the couch. “Is he in trouble?”
Something crosses his face. Not confirmation, exactly, more like he’s decided how much rope to give me.
“Yeah.” He sets his phone down on the windowsill and looks out at the driveway. “You could say that.”
“Then go.” I stand up fully. “Go help him. I’ll be fine here.”
Ian turns, and the expression on his face stops me. So much conflict, raw and barely contained. It’s the look of a man being pulled in two directions at once and hating both of them.
“I can’t do that,” he says. Quiet. Final.
“Ian, if he’s hurt—”
“Sophia.” My name’s in his mouth like a full stop.
“You don’t understand. When Reth told me to keep you safe—” He pauses, choosing, and what he settles on is careful and exact.
“It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t him being an ass.
It was the one thing in the world he was sure about.
” His jaw shifts. “I leave you, I’m not just breaking a promise.
I’m breaking the only thing he’s ever asked of me. ”
“And what’s that?”
“Protecting you when he can’t.”
The room goes quiet, and I look at him while something inside me shifts toward a shape I don’t recognize.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that,” I murmur.
“With what? The fact that he cares about you more than his own safety?”
I sit back down, not quite looking at Ian.
“The fact that he’d rather be out there without his best friend watching his back than leave you here unprotected?”
My throat tightens until it hurts. “He left me here once, unprotected.”
“No, he didn’t.”
My eyes shoot up to meet his. “What do you mean?”
“I was here, Sophia. Not here, here. But here.” He glances up at the ceiling light. I can’t see it, but I immediately know.
“Of course. Cameras,” I say, pulling a hand through my hair.
“You still don’t believe it, do you?” Ian grits out. “That he cares about you?”
“How am I supposed to believe that the man who kidnapped me gives a damn about me? It doesn’t make sense.”
Ian leans back against the wall, arms crossed, watching me like he’s waiting for the punchline of a joke he already knows isn’t funny.
“You’re the therapist. Figure it out.”
My hands shake, so I slide them under my thighs as I stare at the floor. “Caring is… safe. It’s boundaries. It’s asking. It’s not taking without permission or keeping them locked in a house like it’s a prison.”
Ian doesn’t flinch. “So, what you’re saying,” he drawls, low and mocking, “is that if he really cared, he should’ve just…
what? Sent fucking flowers? Left a polite little note saying ‘Hey, my psychotic handler wants you dead, but don’t worry, I’ll handle it from afar’?
That’s the version of caring that fits in your neat little therapist box? ”
“See, that’s exactly what I mean!” My voice cracks as I shove up off the couch.
“He tells me he’s protecting me. You tell me the same shit.
And now you’re throwing around some psychotic handler who wants me dead?
I’m so fucking lost, Ian. All I’m getting are these vague answers, yet you expect me to just…
what? Nod like a good little captive? Pretend I wasn’t dragged here by a man who admitted he stalked me for God knows how long? ”
The air between us thickens. Ian steps closer, boots heavy on the floor, close enough I can see how hard his green eyes are now, no smile left.
“One thing about Reth,” he says, voice dropping into something gravel-rough and dangerous, “he doesn’t feel. That man is hollowed out, empty as a fucking grave. But he trusts me enough to turn his back in a fight because he knows I’ll take a fucking bullet for him. Always.”
My pulse hammers so hard I feel it in my teeth. “There you go again. Being vague. Giving me something that’s nothing.”
“He left me here,” Ian blurts, jaw tight. “Me. The only person alive he trusts with his life. To protect you.”
“I didn’t ask—”
“Blah, blah, blah,” he mocks. “Get over it, Crazy. None of us asked for this shit, and that includes Reth.” He spreads his arms wide. “Yet here we fucking are.”
My chest heaves, eyes stinging with tears I refuse to let fall. “Am I supposed to be grateful he kidnapped me?”
“I dunno what the fuck you’re supposed to be, Crazy.
What I do know is, somewhere, somehow, you became a weakness to him.
A goddamn Achilles’ heel with a heartbeat.
And the second the people who hold his leash figure that out, they’ll use you to bend him back into shape—or they’ll cut you out of him like a tumor. ”
The room is suddenly too small. The air too thick.
My insides feel all wrong, and a tear slips onto my lips before I realize I’m crying.
I don’t even know why I’m crying, and I swipe the tear away before Ian can see it.
But of course, he does, and something in him crumples instantly, all the venom draining out of his face.
“Crazy, I’m sor—”
“It’s okay.” I turn away from him, but he takes my elbow and spins me back.
“I know you didn’t ask for this. I know you’re confused, and I blame Reth for that because the motherfucker really needs to learn how to communicate, but he really is protecting you.
Not because he’s noble. Because you’re the only fucking thing left that makes him want to do more than just existing. ”
Headlights sweep across the wall, tires crunching into snow, and Ian pivots, running to the front door. It opens, and a blast of winter air cuts through the heat of the house, followed by chaos.
A man I don’t recognize fills the doorway. Broad, dark-haired, expression tight with something between anger and fear. And leaning against him, one arm slung across the stranger’s shoulders, barely upright —
Reth.
The sound I make isn’t quite a word. It isn’t quite anything.
His face… it’s terrifying.
White paint is cracked and flaking, smeared into uneven patches. The black circles around his eyes have bled into the white, turning them into deep, hollow voids, and I have no idea what it is I’m looking at.
Blood has dried at his temple, rusty streaks tracking down his ear. And his eyes? Their wild, bloodshot pupils blown wide like he’s still seeing whatever hell he crawled out of.
“Fuck me,” Ian mutters, and I try to say something but can’t find the words.
Reth’s hand hanging limp at his side is covered in blood. Knuckles split open to the bone, skin peeled back in ragged flaps over the joints, like he hit something—or someone—too many times and too hard.
“Sh…she planned it,” Reth mumbles incoherently. “Aaaall of it. It was him. But I…I fucking took his crow, man. Yes, I did. The whoooole fucking thing. Clean off.”
“Christ.” Ian takes Reth’s other side, sliding under his arm with a grunt. The transfer is fast, practiced, the way people move when they’ve done versions of this before and hated every one.
Reth’s weight shifts between them, boots dragging.
“What the fuck happened, Andrei?” Ian’s voice is low, tight, like he’s asking for coordinates instead of an explanation.