“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know how her mind works.” She was showing me. Slowly. Deliberately. The way you let a man see the trap before the teeth close. Not mercy. Theater. Every breadcrumb placed just far enough apart that I’d have to work for it.
“She wanted you to know they got to him?”
“No.” I ball my cut fist, ignoring the pain. “She wanted me to know that she got to Sophia.”
It hangs there, loaded, the kind of thing that can’t be unsaid and doesn’t need to be repeated.
Ian lets out a breath. “How long before she knows you took him out?”
“She already knows.”
“You heard from her?”
“No. But just like I know how her mind works, she knows mine too.” There are people you know the way you know a scar, mapped into you whether you chose it or not. She’s that.
“Once she realizes Sophia disappeared off the face of the earth,” Ian continues, “she’s gonna know you took her.”
“I know.”
The words taste like inevitability. Like something I decided before I fully understood it, the way the largest choices always work—not in a moment but over time, accumulating quietly until the weight of them tips into action.
“You ready for that?”
I look at my hand. At the blood I chose not to flinch from, the geography of a decision made in a kitchen over a knife and a woman who looked at the wound like she wanted to fix it. Ready is irrelevant.
“For my own mental health,” Ian mutters, “I’m gonna take that as a yes.”
A beat.
“Reth…”
“Yeah?”
Another stretch. “You can’t protect them both.”
Ian serves that cold, harsh reality check that settles into my bones. But my stomach doesn’t hollow out. My blood doesn’t run cold. Because I’m not that thing. I don’t feel. I don’t react. I calculate. Dissect. I create invisible threads that stretch and loop from a problem to the most probable solution. Right now, I’m still navigating in which direction I’m threading to.
“Clean the hand. And next time you feel the urge to bleed for dramatic effect—don’t.”
The line clicks dead, and I lower the phone slowly, setting it face-down on the desk. I sit in the dark for a moment, not moving—just letting the silence settle the way it does after Ian, when the conversation stops and the thinking begins. Then I reach forward and wake the monitors.
Four screens. Live feed. The cameras are small—integrated into the architecture, invisible unless you know where to look, and no one who hasn’t installed them would know where to look. The angles are clean. Overlapping fields of view with no dead zones. I built redundancy into everything up here. It’s the only way I know how to work.
The top left is the exterior. Snow and dark and the long driveway disappearing into the tree line. Empty.
Top right, the feed splits three ways—hallway one, hallway two, and the seasons room. Every angle of it, including the bench where she sat until the mountains went dark. I built those cameras in before the ceiling. Before the paint. Before I had a reason I was willing to name.
Bottom right, the stairwell and entryway.
Bottom left, the kitchen and living area. She’s in it.
I lean forward slightly.
She moves slowly, the way people move when they think they’re alone—no performance in it, no self-consciousness, just the particular economy of someone doing a task that requires nothing from them. She’s found a cloth from somewhere, and she’s on her knees on the tile, cleaning up the blood.
My blood.
