"I said I understand."
He doesn't look fully convinced, but he steps back anyway, and that's apparently as close to permission as I'm going to get.
I don't go change. I catch my reflection in the dark window glass on the way to the door—flour still dusted through my hair, dried batter smeared up one forearm and across the front of Reth's old shirt, the one that still smells faintly like him underneath the cinnamon—and some small, distant part of me thinks I should probably look presentable before I leave the house.
I don't care.
Let the whole world see exactly what loving him costs right now.
Andrei holds the door. I step out into air that doesn't smell like flour or guilt or eleven days of waiting, and for the first time since the driveway, I breathe.
21
SOPHIA
The bakery smells like cinnamon, which is the first thing that almost undoes me before I've even ordered anything.
I stand just inside the door for a second longer than I need to, letting it settle into my lungs—warm, sweet, exactly the smell that's been failing to materialize in my own kitchen for eleven days straight, no matter how many batches I ruin trying. There's something almost cruel about it. Like the universe decided that today, of all days, I needed to walk into a bakery that's gotten effortlessly right the one thing I can't stop getting wrong.
The case is full of them. Apple cinnamon. Rows of them, golden-domed, the tops cracked just slightly the way they're supposed to crack, not sunken in the middle like mine, not hard and burnt at the bottom from sitting on the wrong rack while my mind was somewhere else entirely.
I stare at them longer than is reasonable for someone simply buying muffins, and for one absurd moment I want to ask the girlbehind the counter what she's doing differently. What I'm doing wrong. As if the answer might actually be in the recipe and not somewhere upstairs in a bedroom I’m not allowed to enter.
"Six of those," I say, pointing.
She boxes them without comment, ties the string, slides the box across with a small, easy smile that has no idea what it's participating in—no idea that the woman buying them has spent days, weeks, months failing at this exact thing.
I pay. My fingers aren't quite steady on the card reader. I tell myself it's nothing, that I'm just tired, even though I know exactly what it actually is.
I step back outside.
The cold hits immediately, sharper than I expect after the bakery's warmth, the contrast enough to make my eyes water for half a second before I blink it away. It's a clean kind of cold, though—the kind that clears something out rather than just hurting—and for one brief stretch of pavement I let myself just stand in it.
No locked doors out here.
No flinching.
Just cold air against my face and a box of muffins I didn't have to fight for and Andrei fifteen feet away by the truck, scanning the street the way he never quite stops doing, present but not hovering, giving me exactly enough room to feel, for a few seconds, almost like a normal woman doing a normal errand on a normal afternoon.
I almost let myself enjoy it.
Then a car door opens.
I don't notice it at first. Just the sound, ordinary, unremarkable. But something in Andrei's posture changes instantly, his whole body going still and alert in a way thatmakes my stomach drop before I've even turned to look. He's already moving, the casual lean completely gone, and that animal shift of a man who reads danger for a living is what makes the hair on the back of my neck stand straight up.
"Sophia Sinclair."
The voice is wrong before I can identify why. Too composed. Too unhurried, like it's been rehearsed in a very quiet room, at length, until all the edges were filed off.
I turn.
And the world fucking tilts.
I've seen her face before—galas, charity boards, the kind of photographs where everyone looks lit from within because they can afford to be. But photographs don't prepare you for what Valeria Capello does to a sidewalk. She stands like she owns it, like the concrete arranged itself around her. Elegant coat. Flawless posture. Dark eyes—bottomless, ancient—catalog me in one slow, dissecting sweep, peeling back skin and story until I feel flayed open under the overcast sky.
"You know who I am," she says. Not a question. A statement carved from velvet and venom.
Time slows the way it does right before a blade finds bone—every heartbeat a separate, deliberate hammer against my ribs. It’s a strange kind of clarity, finally coming face to face with evil. Finally looking at the face of a thing you knew you hated, but only now truly feel how deeply rooted that hatred is. Like it’s born from marrow, engraved in bone.
