Her eyes drop to the karambit in my hand. Then back to my face. “And you?”
Outside, the engines cut. Silence.
Then doors. One, two, three—the specific sound of vehicle doors opened and closed with deliberate quiet, the sound of people who have done this before and know that silence is its own weapon.
Ian moves to the window. His jaw tightens. “Twelve.”
Twelve of Valeria’s best, because she knows what I’m capable of. One variable she has no clue about. Ian.
He looks at me. I look at him. “Back door,” I say quietly.
“Already clocked it.”
“I’ll take the front.”
“Reth—” Sophia’s voice shakes.
“Ian, get her in the car. The keys are in it.” I check the karambit one final time. “Go when I give you the opening.”
Ian’s jaw tightens. He hates the plan, but he’s going to do it anyway because that’s what I need from him and he’s never once failed me.
“Come on, Crazy,” he says to Sophia. “Stay close.”
“Wait—” She looks at me, green eyes wild and panicked. “You’re coming out the front and meeting us at the car, right? That’s the plan?”
I hold her gaze, my heart beating too fast. It’s already happening. Her being here, the need to keep her safe splits my attention. The part of my mind that should be mapping exits and calculating angles is instead trying not to think about what happens to her if I fail. What happens if I fuck up and she gets hurt? What if I can’t keep her safe?
I know what it takes to survive situations exactly like this. I know the particular quality of focus required, the complete, total absence of anything that isn’t the next ten seconds.
She’s the opposite of that.
She is everything that lives outside the next ten seconds. She is after. She is the reason for after. And having her here, in this room, with those eyes on my face—I’m already compromised in ways I can’t afford to be if I want to make sure Valeria never finds her.
This is why I need her gone. Because she makes me human. And right now, she needs a monster to protect her.
“That’s the plan,” I say and reach out, my fingers bracketing the back of her neck as I press my lips hard against her forehead. “I’m not capable of love,” I whisper. “But if I were…it’s you. Always you.”
The front window shatters.
27
SOPHIA
The world becomes something I don’t have a word for.
Not chaos. Chaos implies disorder. What happens in the next sixty seconds is horrifyingly ordered—Reth moving toward the threat before the glass has finished falling. Ian’s hand closing around my arm, the specific mechanical quality of two men who have rehearsed versions of this moment so many times it lives in their bodies without requiring thought.
“Move,” Ian says.
I move, but I look back. I can’t not look back.
A man crashes through the shattered window, tactical gear and raised weapon. His boots barely touch the floor before Reth is on him. The karambit flashes in a vicious upward arc, and the steel opens the man’s throat in one clean, brutal slice.
Blood explodes outward, and the man makes a wet, choking gurgle as his hands fly to the gaping wound, fingers slipping in the flood pouring down his chest.
My stomach lurches violently, bile rising hot in my throat as he collapses into a pool of red.
Reth doesn’t watch him die. He’s already moving to the second man coming through the window, snatching the man’s wrist and snapping it backward with savage force. Before the scream can leave the man’s throat, Reth drives the karambit into his stomach—not a stab, but a vicious upward rip that tears through muscle and organs with a sickening, wet sound.
