Understanding.
Waiting.
The words line up too neatly. Like a script I wasn’t meant to see.
I step closer. Not into his space. Just close enough that he has to track me.
“You stood there,” I say quietly, “and watched him tell me my entire life was engineered. You let me hear it from his mouth. You let him frame the terms. You let him decide the moment.”
“I told him to,” Nightshade says.
The room exhales in a collective, horrified breath.
Bones swears under his breath. Honey’s head snaps up. Ghost’s eyes widen. Even Hatchet stills, pen frozen mid-air.
I look at Nightshade. Really look at him now.
“You told him to,” I repeat.
“Yes,” he says. And for the first time, something in his control slips. Not much. Just enough. “Because it had to come from him. Because if I’d said it, you would have doubted it. You would have questioned my motives. You would have?—”
“—trusted him more than you?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
Because the answer is yes.
I feel it land, heavy and exact.
“That’s what you decided,” I say. “That I couldn’t handle the truth unless it came from someone with authority.”
“No,” he says, and now there’s strain in it. “I decided you deserved the cleanest version of it.”
A laugh tears out of me before I can stop it.
“Clean,” I repeat. “You let him tell me I’m an asset. That my child is a variable. That returning is inevitable. And you’re calling that clean.”
“I let him give you the framework,” Nightshade says. “I was going to help you survive it.”
There it is.
The real confession.
Ownership of strategy.
Something in the room shifts. The others feel it too. This is no longer about what Valentine did.
It’s about what Nightshade chose.
I don’t raise my voice.
I don’t need to.
“You stood beside me,” I say, “knowing the floor was going to drop out. And you told yourself that because you loved me, you could decide when it happened.”
His breath stutters.
That’s when the panic hits.
