The needle finds the vein like it already knows where it is. Like it's done this so many times the hand doesn't need instruction anymore.
The plunger goes down.
The warmth arrives the way it always arrives—total, immediate, a wave that starts at the point of the needle and spreads outward until it's everywhere, until the gray light softens, until Mary's eyes at the edge of the room go soft and distant, until the smell fades, until the guilt fades, until everything that was sharp a moment ago goes round and warm and far away.
Sophia,I think, as the warmth takes the last of it.
I'm sorry.
I'm so sorry.
The needle slips from my fingers. I don't feel it land. The gray lightholds.
The compass, black ink, north—still there, still pointing, even as everything around it goes soft and warm and quiet.
Even as I go somewhere else. Somewhere with no Mary. No blood. No Valeria.
Just warmth.
Just nothing.
Just—
12
SOPHIA
The drive back up the mountain takes three hours from the airstrip.
I press my forehead to the cool glass and watch the trees blur past, tall pines crowding the narrow road like silent witnesses.
I’ve only ever seen this route going down—the day Ian and I fled the house, leaving Reth behind in a nightmare we couldn’t save him from.
My heart had been cracked wide open then, the same way it is now. Every mile we put between us and him that day felt like another piece of my soul being torn away. I kept thinking the same desperate prayer I’m whispering inside my chest right now.
Come back to me. Please, God, just come back to me.
The first time I traveled this road, I was blindfolded, wrists bound so tightly the rope bit into my skin, terror clawing at my throat.
I remember the sharp smell of pine and gasoline, the cold air leaking under the car door, the way my body catalogued every sharp turn and dip like itcould somehow save me. I had been so sure I was driving toward death, having no idea I was driving towardhim—the man who would ruin me and save me in the same breath, the monster who became my whole world.
Now I’m going back willingly. Not as a captive, but as a woman ready to burn the whole mountain down if that’s what it takes to bring him home.
Ian sits in the passenger seat, silent and still in a way that terrifies me more than any of his usual sharp humor ever could. No sarcasm. No dry jokes to cut the tension. Just this heavy, deliberate quiet, like he’s already stepped into whatever version of himself this rescue will demand.
His hands rest on his thighs, fingers occasionally flexing like he’s testing how steady they still are. I want to reach for him, to thank him for not pretending this is anything less than devastating, but I’m afraid if I touch him, the fragile wall I’ve built around my panic will shatter.
We didn’t have a long discussion after Andrei’s call confirmed what we already felt in our bones. Valeria has him. She’s had him for weeks. The words landed like a death sentence, and in the silence that followed, Ian and I simply looked at each other across the kitchen table. No weighing odds. No calculating survival percentages. Just one brutal, shared understanding.
Reth needs us. So, we go. And whatever we drag out of that house might not be the man we left behind in Greece.
The thought sits like ice in my stomach. I close my eyes, fighting the wave of terror that threatens to pull me under. What if he’s broken beyond repair? What if the Reth who comes back is only a ghost of the man who held me in Paris,who looked at me like I was the only light he’d ever been allowed to touch?
I don’t care.
I’ll take whatever’s left of him.
I’ll love the pieces. I’ll hold the sharp edges. I’ll bleed with him until he remembers who he is.
