Blood gushes out in a hot flood, soaking Reth’s arm to the elbow. He twists the blade deeper, sawing upward before ripping the blade free and shoving the dying man backward.
I press a hand in front of my mouth.
My training has a word for this. Several words. A whole taxonomy of language built to create distance between the witness and the witnessed, to make the unbearable something that can be named and therefore survived.
Every single word has left me.
It’s not the blood, or the screams, or the crash of dead bodies. It’s him. Reth. The way he moves, like water moves through a landscape. His body is completely fluid, no wasted motion, no hesitation, every action the logical consequence of the one before it. He doesn’t pause. Doesn’t flinch. Killing, blood, death, it’s a part of him.
“Sophia.” Ian’s hand tightens on my arm.
“Wait.” I pull back. “You need to help him.”
“Reth can take care of himself.”
The back door explodes inward.
Two men. Moving fast, already splitting to cover different angles. Ian releases me, and what happens next is so swift, so brutal, my mind processes it in fragments rather than sequence.
Ian’s elbow connects with a jaw—the crack of it sharp and wet—a body hitting the kitchen counter and pulling the fruit bowl down with it, apples scattering across the tile. The second man gets his hands on Ian’s jacket, and Ian lets him, uses the grip as leverage, drives his knee up with a force that doubles the man over. When his head comes down, Ian’s knee comes up again to meet it.
Without losing a beat, Ian steps back, raises two guns simultaneously, and pulls the triggers.
The sound is enormous in the enclosed space. It hits me in the chest like a physical thing, like something with weight and edges, and I feel my ears ring in the aftermath.
Ian steps over both bodies without looking down, grabs my hand. “Move. Now.”
He pulls me toward the back hallway, my feet barely touching ground. I shouldn’t look back—I know this—yet I turn anyway, my neck craning against every instinct screaming at me to run.
My pulse explodes, and my chest caves. So many bodies, men who were completely unprepared for what Reth is.
I’mcompletely unprepared for what Reth is.
The karambit is like an extension of himself, like there’s no version of him without it.
A man twice his width comes down on him, and I watch as Reth plunges the curved blade into the side of his neck, twists, and splits the man’s throat in two.
His blood arcs out. It’s on Reth’s face now, clinging to the scar on his cheek, and I know it’s not possible, but it’s like the blood becomes him. Or he becomes the blood. The way he moves through all of it like it isn’t there, like it’s just the specific atmosphere of the world he actually lives in when nobody needs him to be anything softer.
But his expression… that’s what stops my breathing.
It’s completely, utterly blank. Not angry. Not satisfied. Not anything. The eyes that looked at me this morning like I was the only fixed point in his universe are gone. Whatever lives behind them when he’s with me—the warmth, the want, the devastating openness he’s been letting me see—it’s vanished. All that’s left is calculation. Target. Nothing else.
A man rushes Reth from the side—fast, unexpected, getting inside his guard—and for one stomach-dropping second, Reth lets him get close.
I understand why a moment later. Close means the man’s weapon is useless. Close means Reth can hook his leg, drop his weight, take him to the ground with a controlled fall that ends with Reth’s knee on the man’s spine and the blade at the base of his skull.
He doesn’t hesitate.
I flinch at the sound.
Reth is already standing. Already moving to the next one.
“Sophia.” Ian’s voice is in my ear, stripped of everything. “I will carry you out of this house, so help me God.”
We go through the back hallway fast—Ian first, weapon up, me behind him—and at the side exit, two more men are waiting.
Ian takes the first one before he’s finished raising his weapon, a single shot that drops him where he stands. The second gets his hands on Ian, and they grapple for three brutal seconds in the narrow hallway, bodies slamming into walls, before Ian gets the leverage he needs and drives the man headfirst into the doorframe with a sickening crack that ends it.
