We got Jax to his bed, and he eased down slowly, one arm wrapped around his ribs. He lay back with a groan, blinking up at the ceiling, then over at Ferrula’s unflinching glare.
“I may have fucked up,” he said with a half-smile.
Ferrula didn’t return it.
Her hand went to her blade.
“You embarrassed me.”
The words landed like a slap. Cold, deliberate, with venom.
Jax winced, not from pain, but fromher.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said, his voice low. “You would’ve died.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Then I would havedied.On my feet. In a trial. Withhonor.”
She turned toward him fully now, her muscles coiled, like she had to physically restrain herself from saying or doing more.
“You don’t get to decide when I fall, Jax.”
He sat up slowly, his expression uncharacteristically solemn.
“I know that now.”
Ferrula held his gaze a moment longer. Then, with a quiet scoff, she turned back toward her bunk and began unstrapping her armor piece by piece, each buckle louder than the silence that followed.
The tension simmered for hours, stretched thin like the silence before a storm. None of us said much after returning to the barracks. Jax had rested, barely, and Ferrula hadn’t spared him a single glance since she stripped off her armor and folded herself into a stoic, cold wall on the far side of the room.
But it didn’t last.
“You still mad?” Jax finally asked from his cot, his voice casual, but his eyes didn’t move from her.
Ferrula looked up slowly from the whetstone she was dragging across her blade. The sound of metal on stone stopped.
“I don’tgetmad,” she said coolly. “I get disappointed.”
Jax pushed himself upright with a wince. “That’s worse.”
“Damn right it is.”
Riven, and I exchanged a look from across the room. Naia paused in her corner, her hands halfway through braiding her hair, eyes flicking between them like she was bracing for the detonation.
“You stepped into my fight,” Ferrula said, rising to her feet and tossing the blade onto her bunk. “You interfered in a trial thatmeant everythingto me. That wasn’t your right.”
“You were about to take a sword to the face,” Jax shot back. “Forgive me for thinking your life was worth more than a damn tradition.”
Ferrula stalked toward him. “You think I don’t know how close it was? Iwantedto face him. Ineededto. And you stripped that from me.”
“I was trying to protect you!”
“I didn’t need protection!”
Jax stood now, too, wincing slightly but still squaring his broad shoulders. “You think I did it because I don’t trust you?”
She crossed her arms, chin tilted defiantly.
He took a breath. “I didn’t step in because I doubt you. I stepped in because I love you.”
