I've learned how to wait for him. Silence with most people feels like something to fill. With Reth, it's always felt like something to respect. Like the silence is doing work that words would only interrupt.
So I sit with my hands in my lap, and I let it do its work.
"Rowan handed Valeria over," he says finally, the voice he uses when he's keeping himself very controlled around something that wants to be uncontrolled. "Location. Schedule. The guards, which ones can be removed, and which ones already have been." He pauses. "We have her if we want her.”
I catch it immediately.We.NotI have herorshe's mine if I want her—we.One small word carrying everything he isn't saying out loud yet, the assumption so quietly built into it. And it lands somewhere in my chest with a warmth I wasn't expecting, because it means that even now, even sitting on the edge of this bed with something cold and ancient gathering behind his eyes, his first instinct is that whatever comes next includes me. That it was never going to besomething he did alone. That I was already in it before he asked.
I shift lightly. “And you trust him enough to know this isn’t a trap?”
He almost laughs. Not quite—just a short exhale through his nose, the sound of a man who has considered something from every angle and arrived at a conclusion that doesn't entirely sit right but holds anyway.
"I've never trusted Rowan." He says it plainly, no bitterness in it, just fact. He looks at the folded paper on the side table. "But knowing someone and trusting them are different things, and I know Rowan well enough to read the difference between a trap and a transaction."
"And this is a transaction?"
"This is him cashing out." He leans back slightly, forearms still on his knees. "Valeria stopped being useful to him the moment she started acting from obsession instead of strategy. She damaged his operation, drew attention he couldn't contain.” His jaw tightens. "Handing her to me isn't generosity. It's housekeeping. He's removing a liability and collecting on a debt simultaneously." A beat. "That's not a trap. That's just Rowan being exactly who he's always been."
"The debt?”
He breathes out loudly. “Ian doing something unfathomably stupid.” Something moves through Reth's face. Something that costs him to let me see. "He won't tell me what it is yet. But I saw his face when Rowan was talking. Whatever he gave up, it's already done. It's not reversible." He's quiet for a beat. "And whatever it is, it's significant. I know Ian well enough to know the differencebetween him managing information and him carrying something heavy. This is the second one."
I look at him. At the way he's holding himself—the conflict sitting right on the surface, the want and the guilt running alongside each other in a way he's not trying to hide from me.
"You're angry with him," I say.
"I don't have the right to be angry with him." His jaw works. "He got me out. Whatever he gave Rowan, he gave it so I could be sitting here instead of still in that cell, and I know that, and it doesn't stop me from wanting to put him through a fucking wall for it."
"That's not contradiction," I say quietly. "That's just loving someone."
He looks at me.
"You can be grateful and furious simultaneously," I continue. "You can know someone did the right thing and still wish they hadn't had to do it. Those aren't competing feelings, Reth. They're the same feeling from different angles."
He's quiet for a moment.
"He's going to tell me eventually," he says. "Whatever it is."
"Yes."
"And I'm not going to like it."
"Probably not."
I look at his hands. At the compass on his left hand, needle pointing north—toward me, always toward me, the promise he made permanent in ink before he fully understood what he was promising.
He turns his head slightly, not quite looking at me yet. "Iwant her." Quiet. Raw. The admission of something he's been holding tightly for a very long time. “I’ve wanted this for years, Sophia. It’s right there on that piece of paper. And I can feel what that does to me… and I don’t know what it costs a person. What it does to a person on the other side of it. I don’t know what Ian traded to make it possible, and I can’t want something this badly without knowing what I’m really choosing.”
I put my hand over his.
He looks down at it. Then slowly up at me.
"What do you want, Sophia?" His voice is very quiet now. "Tell me what you actually want. Not what you think I need to hear. Not the clinical answer. What youactuallywant." His eyes hold mine. "Because if you want to leave right now, tonight, as far from this mountain as we can get, I’ll do it. I'll let her go. I'll find another way to carry it." A beat. "But I need to know what you want before I decide anything. Because I'm not doing this without you. I won't."
I sit with that for a moment. Think about every framework I've ever been trained in. Revenge as a cycle. Vengeance versus justice. The research on what carrying violence does to the person who carries it. The clinical arguments I've made to other people in other rooms about why retribution doesn't heal the wound, only moves it.
I think about all of it. And then I imagine Reth as a boy. Alone. Broken. Being dragged through hell simply because someone found it easy. I think of him in that cell being mentally, emotionally, physically torn apart. About what she did to his body. About Mary.
Then I think about what it means to spend the rest of our lives knowing she’s out there. Breathing. Living. Movingthrough the world with her elegant coats and her charity galas and her calm, composed smile that never once faltered while she destroyed the man I love.
