"Reth—" Valeria's voice is measured despite my grip. "Don't."
“Go ahead, Mary. Ask her what’s been going on for the last motherfucking thirteen years.”
Silence.
"Ask her," I say again. "Ask her why every time you wanted to visit me, she made sure I was out of the country. Ask her what I do for her. Ask her what she's been holding over my head since I was a little boy."
"Reth, you're scaring me?—"
"Good." My grip tightens. "You should be scared. Not of me. Of her. Of what's been happening in this house while you were living in it."
Valeria’s gaze is etched on mine. “Don’t do something you’ll regret.”
"We had a deal." My voice is unrecognizable. Low and flat and stripped of everything except the thing underneath it that has been building since the underground parking garage. Since the market. Since the plane lifted off with Sophia on it and I stood on a tarmac and watched it go. "We had a fucking deal!"
"We agreed she was untouchable as long as you stayed away. You didn't stay away."
"She needed?—"
"I don't care what she needed. What she needs is irrelevant. What matters is you made a choice. I responded to your choice. That's how this works. That's always been how this works."
My grip tightens, and her mouth gapes for air.
"The man in the market," I say. "You sent him."
"I did."
"You sent someone after Sophia."
"I sent someone to her vicinity." She holds my gaze. "There's a difference."
"There’s no difference!"
"He was a street thug, Nazareth." Her voice doesn't change. "A nobody. A message. I knew he’d never get past you. He was never going to touch her." She pauses. "I just needed you to know that I could.” Her fingers curl around my wrist — not fighting, just resting, the way you rest your hand on something that belongs to you. "I wanted you to know how easy it would be to take her from you."
The rage is so complete it has stopped feeling like rage and started feeling like something structural. Like the walls of a room I've been locked in my whole life finally deciding to come down.
"You were playing with me.”
"I'm always playing with you." She almost sounds fond. "That's what we do, you and I. You know this." Her thumb moves across the back of my hand. "And you look extraordinary when you're furious. You always have."
I lean closer. Until my face is inches from hers. Until she can see exactly what's in my eyes and understand that this version of me is not something she can manage with patience and champagne and silk.
"Valeria." Rowan's voice from the doorway.
“Thank God, Rowan. Tell my brother to let go of her.”
I can hear the panic in Mary’s voice. The fear. It should be doing something to my insides, but it’s just fusing into a cold, steady line, sharp enough to cut through stone.
He doesn’t take his eyes off his wife. "Was the Greece operation yours?"
Valeria turns her head as much as my fingers around her throat allow. Looks at her husband with the unhurried assessment of a woman who has been managing this man for decades and is deciding how much of the truth to offer.
"Everything I do is mine, darling.”
Something moves across Rowan's face. Gone before it can be named.
He looks at me — one beat, two — and I understand in that moment that he didn't know. That Lemnos was Valeria operating outside whatever boundaries exist between them. That she's been going further than even Rowan sanctioned.
