The phone in my pocket vibrates. I feel it even though reality is something I’ve lost the moment I laid eyes on that crow. I glance at the piece of hacked-off skin on the floor, my phone still vibrating. My mind’s a haze, my movements aren’t even mine as I reach for the phone and put it on speaker.
“Nazareth, are you there?” Valeria’s voice oozes through the line, but I say nothing, just staring at the bird. “Sometimes,” shecontinues, “reminders of the past are the best way to guide a stray back home.”
The words land like a bullet in the back of my skull. Everything clicks into place with sickening clarity, my ribs cracking into place around the truth.
She knew. Valeria fucking knew.
She knew exactly who Marek was to me when I didn’t even remember his face. She had kept that name, that face, that fucking tattoo locked away like a loaded gun, waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger. She sent me here on purpose. Not just to kill him. To remind me who I am. What I am.
She wanted me to lose the tiny, fragile piece of humanity I had clawed back the moment I first laid eyes on Sophia. The part that had started to believe I could be something more than this monster. The part that had started to want. She wanted it gone. She wanted me hollow again. Empty. Obedient.Hers.
Sophia’s face flashes behind my eyes, flushed cheeks, parted lips, the way she looked at me in the hallway like I was something worth wanting. The memory should bring peace. It doesn’t. It brings pain so sharp it steals the air from my lungs. Because she’s part of my world now. Because I dragged her into this hell. Because Valeria made sure of it.
All because of me.
I climb off Marek’s dead body, legs numb, boots slipping in the blood. My hand goes to my pocket, and I find the little metal box. White powder. Oblivion. It’s been years since I took a line. It’s also been years since the dead fucker on the floor tore my soul out of my body.
I tap out a thick line on the back of my blood-soaked hand, and without pausing to think about what this means, I bring it to my nose and inhale hard.
The burn explodes behind my eyes. The world tilts again.
And everything goes white.
19
SOPHIA
I’ve lost four hands in a row, and Ian looks insufferably pleased about it.
“You’re telegraphing again. Right here.” He taps the side of his eye with one finger, leaning back in his chair with the ease of someone who has never in his life been uncomfortable anywhere. “Every time you’ve got nothing, you do this thing with your eyes.”
“I don’t do a thing with my eyes.”
“You absolutely do a thing with your eyes.”
I look down at my cards. A three and a seven, mismatched suits, completely useless. I arrange my expression into something I hope is neutral and look back up at him.
He grins. “There it is.”
“That’s not fair. You’ve been doing this for how long?”
“Years.” He smirks and tosses two chips into the center of the coffee table with the casual authority of someone who has already won. “Call or fold, Crazy.”
“Stop calling me that.”
“Never. Call…or fold.”
I fold. Obviously, I fold.
Ian rakes the chips toward himself, stacking them with a precision that feels deliberate and slightly irritating.
I pull my knees up onto the couch and study him the way I’ve been studying him for days now. He’s harder to read than he lets on. The mischief is real, but it sits on top of something else, something older and more careful, and sometimes when he thinks I’m not looking, the mischief goes quiet, and what’s underneath is just… tired.
“You’re doing the therapist thing,” he says without looking up.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re studying me.”
