If I stay compliant, she doesn't look for Sophia. If I stay compliant, Mary stays safe inside the family. If I stay compliant, the wall holds.
The equation is sound. I've tested it from every angle.
Except for the flaw.
The one I circle like a drain every single night, careful never to look down into it. The one that starts whispering the second the house goes quiet and there’s nothing left to drown it out. Thekind of silence that doesn’t protect you. It exposes you. Peels you down to the raw place where the truth bleeds through.
Whatever Sophia built inside me—that impossible, warm, stubborn thing that made me believe, for a few stolen moments, I could be more than a painted face and a blade—it’s leaking. Slowly. Every job, every basement, every body I hose off the floor takes another piece of it. And I’m not getting it back.
I’m running out of her.
Upstairs, the estate is quiet. Late afternoon light slants through the tall windows, catching the dust motes in long, golden shafts. The hallway smells like lemon polish and fresh flowers—Valeria's housekeeper keeps vases on every surface, because even in a house built on blood, the aesthetic must be maintained.
My room is at the end of the east wing. Small by the estate's standards. A bed, a desk, a window that looks out over the rear grounds.
I sit on the edge of the bed. Remove the lollipop stick from my inside pocket.
It's broken. Snapped clean in half at some point during a job I can't pinpoint. But the shape is still there. Heart-shaped. Absurd.
Even monsters deserve love sometimes.
Something behind my ribs collapses inward.
Every night—every single fucking night—when the operational part of my brain finally surrenders and the dark creeps in, I let myself slip. Just for a moment.
I think about her hands on my chest. The gentle drag of her fingertips tracing the tattoo like she was decoding every fractured story I’d carved into my own skin because I was too broken to say any of it out loud. The way her touch made the scar on my face feel less like a brand and more like something she wanted to kiss.
I think about the soft moan she made the first time I pushed inside her—that little broken gasp that sent me reeling while her pussy fit my cock perfectly. She’s the only woman I’ve ever been inside, and I vowed to keep it that way. A vow I had imprinted on my skin.
While rubbing my palms together, I study the fresh tattoos. I never got my hands inked. They had too much blood on them already. Now, both hands are covered in heavy, violent blackwork—overlapping blades, broken chains, faded tally marks, blood droplets scattered like I’ve been washing other people’s lives off my skin for years and never quite got it all. It looks mean. It looks permanent. It looks exactly like the hands of a man who was born to destroy.
But on the top of my left hand sits the real reason I did this. A vow hidden in plain sight, a symbol not even Valeria could interpret.
Each of my fingers carries a single word in stark black ink, like labels on a killer’s tools. East. West. North. South. Between the chaos of ink is a broken compass, glass shattered, metal frame bent and ruined like it was smashed with a hammer. The needle is snapped clean in half, but the remaining piece is frozen—pointing straight toward my ring finger.
North.
Her.
She was the first woman I ever had.
She will be the last.
My true north.
And I’ll bleed myself dry before I ever let the needle point anywhere else.
Fuck, I hate how much I miss her. I hate the ache of broken bones inside my chest. I hate how shallow every breath is without her.
It hurts so fucking much I have to press the heel of my hand against my sternum just to keep the pain from splitting me open. My throat burns. My eyes sting behind the paint. I want her so badly my hands shake with it—not the violent kind of want I’m used to, but the terrifying kind that makes a man like me dangerous. The kind that makes me want to burn the whole world down just to crawl back into her arms and let her call me Nazareth again.
I let the pain crest, let it wash over me until my chest feels too small for my heart, until I can almost smell vanilla and orange peel on my skin.
Then I shove it all back down. Hard. Brutal. The way I’ve been trained to do everything. Because I can’t afford to think of her too much. Thinking about her is a door, and behind that door is the taste of her mouth—warm, clean, that sweetness that was only ever hers. If I taste it, even in memory, even for half a second, I’ll go to her. I won’t decide to. I’ll just be moving. Plane, train, stolen car, my own two bleeding feet across every mile between this house and the apartment in Paris. I won’t stopuntil her body is pressed against mine, until her mouth is on my mouth, until her hands are sliding under my shirt like she’s trying to hold all the broken pieces of me together again.
I slip the lollipop stick back into my pocket, right against my heart, and close my eyes.
Tomorrow there will be another job. Another city. Another name that doesn’t matter.
