“Thank you,” she says quietly.
I nod again.
Then I do the hardest thing I’ve done in years:
I walk away.
Because if I stay — if I stand there watching her talk to Finn, watching her laugh weakly at the rookie’s joke, watching Finn hover like a shield she trusts—
I’ll explode.
And I can’t do that to her.
Not when she’s already drowning.
Not when she chose someone else to save her last night.
Not when I’m too much of a storm for her to stand close to.
Chapter 26: Wren
Atlas walks away likethe hallway is a cliff edge, and the only way to keep from falling is to turn his back on me.
Finn exhales behind me, a careful sound.Kael doesn’t say anything at all.His presence is a steady pressure at my right shoulder—permission to stay, permission to go, permission to breathe.None of it is enough.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, though nobody asked me to explain.
I follow Atlas.
The light changes around the corner, humming bulbs strobing faintly where the corridor narrows.The concrete smells like cold and rubber and the faint sweetness of the detergent the custodians use after games.Atlas stops halfway down the hall, both palms braced against painted cinderblock, head bowed.His back rises and falls too fast.His shoulders look like they’re holding a building up.
I slow.I don’t touch him.
“Atlas?”
He lifts his head sharply, the motion too controlled to be casual.For a split second, I see all of it—anger, yes, but buried under something else.Hurt.A strange, flayed kind of hurt that doesn’t have anywhere to live in a man like him.
