Chapter 27
SOPHIA
The world becomes something I don’t have a word for.
Not chaos. Chaos implies disorder. What happens in the next sixty seconds is horrifyingly ordered—Reth moving toward the threat before the glass has finished falling.
Ian’s hand closing around my arm, the specific mechanical quality of two men who have rehearsed versions of this moment so many times it lives in their bodies without requiring thought.
“Move,” Ian says.
I move, but I look back. I can’t not look back.
A man crashes through the shattered window, tactical gear and raised weapon. His boots barely touch the floor before Reth is on him. The karambit flashes in a vicious upward arc, and the steel opens the man’s throat in one clean, brutal slice.
Blood explodes outward, and the man makes a wet, choking gurgle as his hands fly to the gaping wound, fingers slipping in the flood pouring down his chest.
My stomach lurches violently, bile rising hot in my throat as he collapses into a pool of red.
Reth doesn’t watch him die. He’s already moving to the second man coming through the window, snatching the man’s wrist and snapping it backward with savage force.
Before the scream can leave the man’s throat, Reth drives the karambit into his stomach—not a stab, but a vicious upward rip that tears through muscle and organs with a sickening, wet sound.
Blood gushes out in a hot flood, soaking Reth’s arm to the elbow. He twists the blade deeper, sawing upward before ripping the blade free and shoving the dying man backward.
I press a hand in front of my mouth.
My training has a word for this. Several words. A whole taxonomy of language built to create distance between the witness and the witnessed, to make the unbearable something that can be named and therefore survived.
Every single word has left me.
It’s not the blood, or the screams, or the crash of dead bodies.
It’s him. Reth. The way he moves, like water moves through a landscape.
His body is completely fluid, no wasted motion, no hesitation, every action the logical consequence of the one before it.
He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t flinch. Killing, blood, death, it’s a part of him.
“Sophia.” Ian’s hand tightens on my arm.
“Wait.” I pull back. “You need to help him.”
“Reth can take care of himself.”
The back door explodes inward.
Two men. Moving fast, already splitting to cover different angles. Ian releases me, and what happens next is so swift, so brutal, my mind processes it in fragments rather than sequence.
Ian’s elbow connects with a jaw—the crack of it sharp and wet—a body hitting the kitchen counter and pulling the fruit bowl down with it, apples scattering across the tile.
The second man gets his hands on Ian’s jacket, and Ian lets him, uses the grip as leverage, drives his knee up with a force that doubles the man over.
When his head comes down, Ian’s knee comes up again to meet it.
Without losing a beat, Ian steps back, raises two guns simultaneously, and pulls the triggers.
The sound is enormous in the enclosed space. It hits me in the chest like a physical thing, like something with weight and edges, and I feel my ears ring in the aftermath.
Ian steps over both bodies without looking down, grabs my hand. “Move. Now.”
He pulls me toward the back hallway, my feet barely touching ground. I shouldn’t look back—I know this—yet I turn anyway, my neck craning against every instinct screaming at me to run.
My pulse explodes, and my chest caves. So many bodies, men who were completely unprepared for what Reth is.
I’m completely unprepared for what Reth is.
The karambit is like an extension of himself, like there’s no version of him without it.
A man twice his width comes down on him, and I watch as Reth plunges the curved blade into the side of his neck, twists, and splits the man’s throat in two.
His blood arcs out. It’s on Reth’s face now, clinging to the scar on his cheek, and I know it’s not possible, but it’s like the blood becomes him.
Or he becomes the blood. The way he moves through all of it like it isn’t there, like it’s just the specific atmosphere of the world he actually lives in when nobody needs him to be anything softer.
But his expression… that’s what stops my breathing.
It’s completely, utterly blank. Not angry.
Not satisfied. Not anything. The eyes that looked at me this morning like I was the only fixed point in his universe are gone.
Whatever lives behind them when he’s with me—the warmth, the want, the devastating openness he’s been letting me see—it’s vanished.
All that’s left is calculation. Target. Nothing else.
A man rushes Reth from the side—fast, unexpected, getting inside his guard—and for one stomach-dropping second, Reth lets him get close.
I understand why a moment later. Close means the man’s weapon is useless. Close means Reth can hook his leg, drop his weight, take him to the ground with a controlled fall that ends with Reth’s knee on the man’s spine and the blade at the base of his skull.
He doesn’t hesitate.
I flinch at the sound.
Reth is already standing. Already moving to the next one.
“Sophia.” Ian’s voice is in my ear, stripped of everything. “I will carry you out of this house, so help me God.”
We go through the back hallway fast—Ian first, weapon up, me behind him—and at the side exit, two more men are waiting.
Ian takes the first one before he’s finished raising his weapon, a single shot that drops him where he stands.
The second gets his hands on Ian, and they grapple for three brutal seconds in the narrow hallway, bodies slamming into walls, before Ian gets the leverage he needs and drives the man headfirst into the doorframe with a sickening crack that ends it.
He steps over him without looking down. “Car. Now.”
“No.” I pull against Ian’s grip. “We have to wait for him.”
“Sophia, we don’t have—”
“Reth!” I scream and wrench free, but Ian snakes his arms around my waist and pulls me back. “Let me go!”
“Don’t fight me, Crazy. Please.”
“Fuck you. Reth! Reth, please!”
He appears in the doorway, and I almost sag in relief. I don’t care that he’s covered in blood. I don’t care that the blade is dripping crimson. All I care about is that he’s here, and now we can all leave. Together.
But he’s just standing there. He’s not moving. And his face is doing the thing it does when he’s managed himself back into something controlled, something that can compartmentalize because all that matters is the objective. The target. The execution.
I shake my head, first in disbelief, then in panic. “No.”
“Ian will keep you safe.”
“No. No. No.” I try to claw out of Ian’s arms, but he won’t let me. “You said you’re coming with us.”
Blue eyes that were warm and soft a few hours ago are now cold and hard, and I hate it. I hate everything about it. About this. It’s all fucking wrong.
“If I go with you, she won’t stop.”
“Who is she?” I demand, biting back tears. “Who the fuck is this woman you keep talking about?”
Something moves across his face so fast I almost miss it—pain, real and unmanaged, the specific pain of a man doing the thing that costs him most.
There’s the distinct sound of tires crunching over snow outside.
“We got more company,” Ian bites out.
“Nazareth, please,” I plead, tears slipping down my cheeks. “Come with us.”
He holds my gaze for one more second. One more heartbreaking, world shattering second, then looks at Ian.
“Go.”
Ian moves, and the world lurches and tilts.
I don’t stop fighting until the car door closes—and even then, I’m not done, because the door closing isn’t the end of it.
The door closing is just a new obstacle, and my hand finds the handle immediately, yanking, because he’s still in there, he’s still in that house, and if I can just get back—
“Sophia. Stop.”
“Let me out.” I yank the handle again. “Ian, let me out of this car.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Let me out!”
The car is already moving, Ian’s foot on the accelerator, the mountain road unspooling in the headlights. I throw myself at the door, yanking it hard, desperate to get out, to go back.
Ian’s arm shoots across the center console and catches me, iron-hard across my chest, pinning me to the seat. “You need to fucking stop!”
“There are too many of them.” The words come out wrecked. “We have to go back, we have to—”
“We can’t go back.”
“They’re going to kill him!”
“No, they won’t! Okay?” His voice cracks on it. Ian’s voice never cracks. “They fucking won’t.”
I stop pulling at the door. Look at him through eyes so full of tears I can barely see.
His jaw is working. His knuckles are white on the wheel. And I realize, in the specific, terrible way you realize things when everything has been stripped down to what’s real, that Ian is holding himself together by the same thread I am.
“She won’t kill him,” he says. Softer. Like he’s saying it for both of us.
“How can you be so sure?”
A long pause. The road winds down through the dark. “Because he’s the best weapon she’s got.”
The word lands like a punch to the chest. Weapon. Not a person. Not the man who pressed his forehead to mine and whispered words he said he wasn’t capable of.
“He’s not a weapon,” I spit out.
“Yeah, Crazy.” He glances at me. “He is.”
We drive. Away from the house, away from the murderous calculus behind us, down the mountain road slick with black ice. My hands tremble somewhere between rage and fear and the stupid, useless helplessness of being in this fucking car and not with him.
I swipe angrily at the tears on my face. “Will she hurt him?”
Ian keeps his eyes fixed on the road, hands clenched so tightly around the steering wheel that the tendons in his forearms stand out like cables under strain.
His silence is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard. Louder than the window shattering. Louder than the gunshots echoing down the hallway. Louder than my own screaming.
Something inside me breaks.
Not clean. Not a sharp, merciful snap. It’s the slow, grinding, tectonic kind of breaking—the kind that happens so deep you don’t see the cracks on the surface, but you feel the fault lines shifting, rearranging everything you thought was solid.
I lean back into the seat, the mountain trees blurring past in streaks of green and white. Tears slide silently down my face, hot and endless.
Everything hurts. My chest feels hollowed out, scraped raw, and I don’t know where in my body this much pain is supposed to fit. But somehow it does. Because I have no idea what’s going to happen to him. What fresh hell he’s going to have to crawl through.
But the worst part, the thought that keeps twisting like a knife, is wondering if I’ll ever see him again.
And if I do…what monster will they have carved him back into?
Reth and Sophia’s story isn’t over.
The obsession deepens. The mask slips further.
And it only gets darker.