He studied me for a long moment, reading everything I wasn’t saying, everything I couldn’t hide from someone who’d been exactly where I was standing now.
“You think being useful will make you worthy of her.”
I froze.
How the hell did he...
“I’ve seen that look before.” Quiet but relentless.
I stared at him. Hating that he could see straight through me.
Hating more that he was probably right.
He crossed his arms over his chest. “If you seize during infiltration, I leave you behind. Understand?”
I nodded once. Sharp.
Managed one word. “Understand.”
“No heroics. No one-man shows. Follow orders. We function as a unit or we don’t function at all.”
Another nod.
“And if your symptoms worsen before we leave, if the seizures return, if the tremors get worse, if your vision starts failing, you stay here. Non-negotiable.”
My hands clenched. Joints ached. I wanted to argue. Wanted to tell him to go to hell, I was going to Geneva whether he liked it or not.
But he was right.
If I became dead weight in the middle of Dresner’s fortress, I’d get all three of us killed.
I forced the word out slowly, deliberately. “Agreed.”
His shoulders relaxed slightly, just a fraction. “Then you’re in.”
Relief hit me harder than I expected. Made my breath stutter for half a second before I locked it down.
I was going to Geneva. Going to get those deactivation codes. Going to rip them out of Dresner’s servers and destroy them if I had to.
Going to fix this.
Going to survive long enough to tell Clare everything I couldn’t say yesterday when she walked away from me.
Her name circled through my head with a certainty I had no business feeling. Not when I didn’t even know my own past. Not when Maeve’s name still echoed in my skull.
But I felt it anyway. Something absolute whenever I thought about Clare. About how she’d dragged me out of that alley half-dead and refused to leave even when Hellhound gave her the chance to run. Her hands on my skin. Her voice pulling me back from the edge of oblivion.
She mattered.
More than made sense. More than I could explain.
And Maeve, whoever she was, whatever she’d meant to me, didn’t change that.
The name was still there in my head. Undefined. A woman’s face I couldn’t see clearly, features blurred from water damage. Someone from before. Someone who’d mattered, probably. Maybe still did, in ways I couldn’t remember.
But not the same.
Not even close.
