And then I stop, staring at the open door at the end of the hallway.
My heart stutters then fractures as I still in the threshold—autumn on one half of the ceiling, spring on the other, the two seasons meeting in the center without blending, two things that should never share a room sharing one.
For a long moment, I’m frozen. I can almost see himstanding by the window. Almost feel the way the air would shift when he stepped close, the way his voice would drop when he said my name like a prayer and a warning all at once.
“I’ve been breathing you, Sophia Sinclair.”
A slow, aching split starts in my chest and spreads outward until every breath hurts.
It’s everywhere, the longing for him, the need for him to be okay, to come back to me so we can watch more sunrises and sunsets together in this room.
The view through the window hits me the way it always has as I step inside. The mountain. The sky. The sheer scale of a landscape that makes everything human feel appropriately small.
That's what breaks me open. Not the memory of standing here the first time. Not the bench, the murals, the muffins, any of it. Just the view. Still there. Still doing what it always did, enormous and unhurried and completely unmoved by everything that has happened since the last time I stood in front of it.
My eyes sting. I don't fight it.
I let it in.
All of it.
Everything I’ve been holding at a careful, functional distance for weeks.
The bench by the moat in Joetsu, where I sat every morning feeding swans and counting days like rosary beads. The flowers that never came. Apple cinnamon muffins baking at midnight because I needed something—anything—that still felt like him. Ian’s kiss. The desperate press of his mouth against mine that felt so good and so terribly wrongat the same time. The way he pressed his forehead against mine afterward.
And then his vow. The one he made after confessing he had fallen for me.
“I’m going to bring him back to you, Crazy. I fucking swear it.”
The memory slices deep. Ian—steady, sarcastic, unbreakable Ian—had looked me in the eyes and laid his heart at my feet, knowing I belonged to someone else. Knowing I would always belong to Reth. And still he made that promise. A sacrifice. A vow to drag the man I love back to me even if it destroyed whatever chance he might have had.
Tears spill hot down my cheeks. My shoulders shake with silent sobs as I curl tighter on the window bench, staring out at the indifferent mountain.
How cruel is love, that the two men who have torn my heart in opposite directions are both willing to bleed for me? One lost in the dark, the other standing ready to walk into it to bring him home. And here I am—caught between them, loving one with every shattered piece of me while the other offers his own heart as collateral.
“I can't fix this. I can't make it fair,” I whisper brokenly to the empty room. “But I need you both. Please… just come back to me, Nazareth. Let Ian bring you home. I can’t lose either of you.”
The mountain gives no answer. Only the quiet weight of two men’s devotion pressing down on my chest until it feels like it might cave in completely.
The mountain doesn't move. The light does, slowly, the way it always does in the late afternoon, shifting across thefloor in long gold bars that travel toward the window and disappear.
Eventually, I hear Ian in the doorway, then he sits down beside me.
We look at the mountain together.
"This house," I start. I don't know how to finish it. I try again. "The first time I came here, I was blindfolded. I thought I was going to die. And then the blindfold came off, and I stood in a bedroom with glass walls and a mountain outside and I thought—" I stop. "I thought it looked like something I'd imagined."
"It was," Ian says quietly. "He built it for you."
I turn to face him fully. He’s watching me with that same heavy stillness he’s carried since Japan. His eyes are tired, but there’s something else in them now—something deeper, more resigned.
"Do you trust him?"
Ian’s jaw tightens. “Nope.”
"Then why?—"
"Do we have a choice?" He pulls a hand down his face, leans forward with his elbows on his knees. "He has inside knowledge. Security rotations. Blind spots. The people she owns and the people she rents. We don't have any of that." A beat. "So. Do I trust him? No. Do I need what he knows? Yes."
