“In three fucking months?”
“She's been running me hard,” I say.
“How hard?”
I clench my jaw and stare at the city without seeing any of it.
“Reth?”
“Sixteen jobs in three months. No recovery time between.”
Ian stops chewing. “Jesus. She’s never run you that hard.” He sets the croissant down. Looks at me with that flat, stripped-back expression that means he's stopped performing and started calculating. “That's not operational tempo.”
“It’s punishment.” I rub my hands together, that nervous itch coming to life whenever I talk about her. “She’s punishing me.”
“For what?”
I glance inside the apartment. “For choosing Sophia over her.”
Ian is quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that means he's running it and doesn't like where it lands. “She can't touch Sophia directly.”
“No. We have an arrangement. Sophia stays untouched as long as I stay compliant.” I look at my hands. “So she touches me instead. Volume. Exhaustion. Making sure I'm across four continents with no time to think straight. No time to get close to Mary. No time to be anything except what she needs me to be.” I pause. “It's elegant, in a way. The punishment and the control are the same thing.”
Ian stares at me. “That's not elegant. That's sadistic.”
“With Valeria, those are the same thing too.”
He picks the croissant back up. Doesn't eat it. Just holds it the way he holds things when he needs his hands to have something to do. “How close is she to figuring out where Sophia is?”
“Close enough that I can't stay much longer.”
“And not close enough that you didn't come.”
“No,” I say. “Not close enough for that.”
“So what? In five days you leave?—”
“Two.”
Ian stills. The easy register is completely gone now. What's left is the stripped-back version—the one that doesn't perform anything. “Does she know?”
I don't answer.
He looks at me for a long moment, then through the glass doors into the apartment, toward the closed bedroom door, toward where she's sleeping. Something moves through his expression that he doesn't bother controlling.
“Two days, Reth. She's not gonna take that well.”
“That's why I'm not going to tell her.”
Ian turns back to me slowly. “Sorry?”
“You heard me.”
“I heard you say something spectacularly stupid, yes.” He sets the croissant down. “You're just going to—what? Let her wake up one morning and you’re gone?”
Something tightens across my shoulders, and I bite down on the silence.
“That's your plan?”
