My hands curl into fists at my sides, the old, familiar violence surging so hard my vision narrows. “In town?”
She nods.
“She came near you?” The words come out low and lethal. “She fucking dared to get close to you?”
“Reth—”
“Andrei. I’m gonna kill him. I’m going to fucking?—”
“Reth, stop.”
“No. Andrei was supposed to keep you safe.” I yank open the drawer, take the karambit—the first time since I got back—and rush to the door. “Motherfucker.”
“Reth, please,” she cries behind me, and I swing to face her.
"Say it," I blurt, not sure where my rage begins and the horror ends. Valeria came close to her. Too fucking close. And now she knows. "Whatever you came to say, say it so I can go downstairs and carve out my head of security’s motherfucking spine for letting that bitch near you."
A tear trickles down her cheek, and it undoes something inside me.
“This is exactly why I wanted you out. Out of my room.Out of my head. Out of my fucking life, because of this right here.” The words are like thorns coming up my throat. “You, the only woman I’ve ever loved, and look what I did to you. I brought this poison into your life, and I fucking hurt you,” I spit out, not because I’m angry at her. Because I’m angry at my fucking self. “I broke us because of what I did, and I don’t want you to see me live with that. I don’t wantyouto live with that.”
She looks at me for a long moment, a tear trickling down her cheek. And I wait for it, thehow could you, why didn't you fight harder, you said you loved me. I wait for the thing I've been rehearsing answers to in the dark for so long, the thing I've never been able to answer, the thing that has no answer.
“Say it, goddammit, Sophia. Say how much you hate me now that you know.”
"It's not your fault," she says, soft, slow.
Something inside me stops. The words land in the wrong order. They don't assemble into anything I recognize.
"What?"
She doesn't look away from me for even a second. "It’s not. Your fault."
Something in my chest tears open like a wound that was never given the chance to scar.
“Of course, it is. It’s my?—"
"It’s not your fault." She takes one step toward me. I don't step back, which costs me. “You need to hear me say it one more time? I’ll say it.” She comes to stand right in front of me, head craned as she looks me in the eye. “It’s not. Your fault, Nazareth Hale.”
My throat closes completely.
“It’s not your?—”
"You're wrong," I snap, jaw clenched, words coming out wrecked. "What I did?—"
“—was not your fault. None of it.”
“How would you know? You weren’t there.”
“Because I know you. Because I know you love me. Because I know you would never…ever…everhurt me.”
The words hit harder than any punch Ian could have thrown. They sink in deep, past the scars, past the needle marks, past the rot Valeria left behind, and they burn.
I want to believe her.
God, I want it so badly it feels like another kind of withdrawal—shaking, desperate, clawing at the edges of me. But the other voice is louder. The one that still smells like that cell. The one that still feels her hands on me when I close my eyes.
I shake my head, stepping back until my shoulders hit the wall.
