Not just your hands or your mouth or the weight of you beside me.
The ordinary of you.
The sound of you in the next room. The knowledge that if I walked through that door, you'd look up.
That you'd know it was me before I said a word.
I have no idea how long this will last.
But tonight, you're here and the water is warm and the moon is out and Ian is burning something that smells like garlic and I can hear your voice through the open door.
Tonight, that's everything.
20
SOPHIA
Glass walls. Mountain air. The sound of something shattering that I feel before I hear.
He's there. Standing in the middle of the room with blood on his hands and the karambit loose in his grip and his eyes on mine — blue and open his. The eyes I know. The ones that found me and never quite looked away.
Come here,I try to say. My mouth doesn't work.
Something shifts.
Not all at once. The way ice cracks — a sound first, barely there, then the fracture spreading before you understand what's happening. His face changes by degrees. His jaw. The set of his mouth. His eyes going darker, then darker still, the winter-blue draining out of them like color bleeding from a photograph left too long in the sun.
I reach for him.
He looks at my outstretched hand like he doesn't know what it is.
Nazareth—
His mouth moves. The voice that comes out isn't his. It's a woman’s, coming from his throat — soft and warm and patient and completely without mercy — and something in my chest tears open at the wrongness of it, the specific horror of the person you love most becoming the vehicle for the thing that's destroying them.
His face keeps changing.
The scar splits differently now. Wider. Wrong. Rearranging itself across features I no longer recognize. I know the architecture of his face better than I know my own — I've traced it in the dark, memorized it by feel, mapped every line and angle — and watching it become something I can't name is worse than any violence. Worse than the blood. Worse than the karambit.
He's looking at me and nobody's home.
Reth.I'm screaming it now. I can feel myself screaming it.Reth, look at me. It's me. Look at me.
His head tilts. Slowly. The way a stranger tilts their head at something they don't understand.
He raises the karambit.
No—
The lights go out. One by one. Room by room. The glass walls go dark and the mountain outside disappears and I'm running toward him through nothing, through absolute black, reaching for a face I can no longer see, screaming a name into a silence that swallows it.
My hands find his chest. But then he’s gone. Just cold air where he was. Just the annihilating emptiness of a space that held something precious and doesn't anymore.
I claw at it. Both hands. Trying to find the edges of him, the shape of him, anything.
Nazareth—
Sophia…
