“Who is that?” I press. “Is it Reth?”
For a single second, hope flares too bright, too real, and I’m already feeling Reth’s arms around me, already expecting his lips to claim mine. But while Ian holds my gaze, I can see the war—the part of him that wants to protect me from whatever this is, and the sliver of hope fades.
There’s something different in his eyes, something sharper, more terrifying.
He looks at his phone’s screen, and his jaw tightens so hard I hear the click of his teeth.
"I have to go outside," he says. He's already moving toward the door, pulling on his jacket from the hook withthe quick efficiency of someone who doesn't want to give me time to respond. "Stay inside. I'll be right back."
A chill seeps in as he opens the back door and steps out into the garden before I can say anything, leaving a vacuum of terror behind him.
I stand in the kitchen for exactly three seconds, heart slamming against my ribs, every instinct screaming that if I let him walk out there alone something irreversible will happen.
Then I follow him.
He hears my footsteps on the path and turns sharply. "Sophia?—"
"Don't." I pull my cardigan tighter against the pre-dawn chill and keep walking, my bare feet cold on the stones. "Don't tell me to go inside."
"I need you to?—"
"Ian." I stop in front of him on the garden path, close enough that he can't look past me. Tears are already burning in my eyes. "You have been managing me for twenty-five days. You have been very good at it, and I have let you because I understood why and because some part of me wasn't ready to stop being managed." I hold his gaze, my voice shaking. "But whatever is happening right now, I need to know. So I am not going back inside. I can't. Not when it feels like the world is ending out here and you're trying to keep me from seeing it."
There's a look on his face—frustrated and frightened and something else underneath both of them. His eyes are glassy. The garden is dark and the pre-dawn air is warm and thick, and somewhere down the road a dog barks once and goes quiet.
He looks at me for a long moment, eyes roving over my features like he’s staring at something precious. "I need to find Reth."
I blink. "But you said we had to wait. The protocol?—”
“Fuck the protocol.”
“I don’t…” I search his face. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I want to find him, too, but this whole time you’ve been giving me nothing but reasons not to. That searching for him risks exposing us, and it’s too dangerous. Why the sudden change of heart?”
“Because everything's changed," he blurts. "Everything's fucking changed, Sophia." He drags a hand through his hair. "Three weeks I've been sitting in that house telling you the protocol exists for a reason, telling you we wait, we stay dark, we trust the system. And I believed it. I did. Because that's what he asked me to do, and I—" He stops. His jaw tightens. "And then you're in the kitchen at midnight falling apart over muffins, and when I kissed you—” He cuts himself off, gaze fixed on me like I’m his true north. “When I kissed you, the truth knocked me off my ass, Crazy.”
I press my lips together, then, “What truth?”
He hesitates, placing his hands on his hips like he’s afraid they’d reach for me. “That somewhere between the mountains and Paris and Greece and Japan…I’ve started to feel more for you than I’m allowed to.”
My heart does something it’s never done before. It breaks and splinters into tiny sharp-edged piece of grief. “Ian?—”
He rushes up to me, grabs my face in his palms, forcing me to look up and into his eyes. “I have to find him, Sophia. Not just because he's my friend. Not just because I love himlike a brother. But because the longer I stay here with you, the more I fall for you. And I can't fucking leave, I can’t walk away from you because I made the man who saved my life more than once a promise." A beat, his gaze studying me. "So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, Crazy. And I'd like to get out of it before I do anything I know Iwon'tregret, but it’ll hurt the two people I care most about in this entire goddamn world."
The garden holds still around us.
I don't say anything. There's nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse. So I just look at him, and he looks at me, and the truth of it sits between us in the dark, finally named, finally out in the open air where it can't fester.
Ian’s thumb traces my bottom lip, and I see everything in his eyes. The desperation, the longing, the ache, the absolute guilt for wanting something—someone that’s not his. And that’s what I am. Not his. I never will be, because everything I am, everything I ever will be belongs to Nazareth, in this lifetime and the next.
“I’m sorry.” My lips quiver with the words.
“Don’t be.” His hand finds the back of my neck, and he leans down, placing a tender kiss on my head. “I’m going to bring him back to you, Crazy. I fucking swear it.”
Then the gate opens, and Ian steps back as we both turn. The man who comes through it is large, and he moves in a way I’ve learned to recognize in men who exist in Reth's world.
I know him—it takes a half-second, the low pre-dawn light rearranging his face, but I know him. The flatness of his features. The clipped EasternEuropean stillness of him. The eyes that sweep the garden before they settle on anything.
He brought Reth home from Prague.
