North.
Then everything goes dark.
15
SOPHIA
Ihear the car before I see the headlights.
I’ve been sitting on the front step for hours, maybe longer. Time stopped meaning anything the moment Ian left to get him. He told me to wait inside where it was warm. I lasted eleven minutes.
Now the fall mountain air wraps around me like a damp shroud—crisp leaves and pine and the faint rot of things dying beautifully—and I don’t feel any of it. I don’t feel anything except the crushing, endless ache that’s lived inside my chest since the night Ian pulled me away from him and into the plane.
The sky overhead is vast and mercilessly indifferent, scattered with early autumn stars that don’t care that my entire world might be coming back to me in pieces.
I watch the road, and I force myself to breathe—one shallow inhale after another—because if I let my mind go past the next breath, I’ll break. I’ll drown in the what-ifs that have beenpoisoning me for weeks.
What if he’s gone?
What if he’s hurt?
What if the man who comes back isn’t mine anymore?
Headlights finally cut through the trees. My heart lurches so violently I gasp aloud.
I stand on shaky legs, half-thinking I might run to meet them, but the car pulls in too fast—gravel spitting, dust swirling like smoke from a dying fire.
Doors open. Ian steps out first, and a fragile wave of relief crashes over me, like something long-held breaking open. Ian’s alive. Unharmed. And he’s moving with that tense, purposeful stride that says the mission isn’t over yet.
Andrei follows. Then they both turn to the back seat, reaching in, helping?—
I press both hands over my mouth to trap the sob already clawing its way out.
“Nazareth,” I whisper, the name fracturing on my tongue like a word I’ve been holding in my mouth for too long, afraid to swallow, afraid to speak.
He’s on his feet, but only barely. His body sags between Ian and Andrei, weight distributed like a man whose limbs have forgotten they belong to him. His chin is down, hair grown out and matted, obscuring most of a face I can still read from twenty feet away—every line of it worn down to something hollow.
The driveway light catches just enough of him to show me the damage—the sharp jut of collarbones where I once rested my cheek, the way his shoulders curve inward like he’s trying to shield whatever shattered fragments of his soul remain.
He’s beenunmade. Piece by careful, cruel piece. And I feel it—the specific, private grief of watching someone you love discover they were worth destroying.
He lifts his head.
Our eyes meet across the driveway.
My heart shatters all over again.
Those piercing blue eyes I've carried with me through every sleepless night look at me like I'm a cruel hallucination. There's no joy there yet. Only raw, disbelieving terror. The kind of look that breaks something open in my chest because I don't understand it. I don't know what put it there. I don't know what happened behind those walls to make him look at me like I might dissolve if he blinks—but I feel the weight of it.
It takes all but a few moments for something to flicker beneath the damage. Something desperate and aching andhimfighting its way through the haze. Recognition. Need. Love so fierce and fragile it hurts to witness.
“Reth.” His name tears out of me, small and cracked and full of every tear I’ve swallowed for too long.
He says nothing. But his eyes stay locked on mine, and his body—barely upright, barely his—turns toward me like a compass finally finding true north. Not a choice. Just gravity. Just the inevitable pull of two souls that were never meant to be apart this long.
I don’t decide to move. My feet find the ground on their own.
Gravel bites my feet. Cold fall air stings my face. None of it registers. Ian sees me coming and steps aside without a word, and then Reth’s arm slips from his shoulder and I’m crashing into him—arms wrapping around his waist like I can fuse our broken pieces back together.
