Not loud. Not dramatic.
Just a fracture in the perfect containment he’s been maintaining.
“I do. I love you,” he says.
The words are too raw. Too immediate. Like he’s thrown them without aiming.
“I love you,” he repeats, stepping forward before he catches himself. “Everything I did was because I love you. I couldn’t let them take you apart before you were ready. I couldn’t?—”
“Stop,” I say.
He does.
Immediately.
That hurts more than if he hadn’t.
I look at him for a long moment.
Then I nod.
“I know,” I say.
The room goes utterly silent.
“I know you love me,” I continue. “I’ve never doubted that.”
His face shifts – hope, relief, something fragile cracking open.
And then I finish it.
“And that’s what makes this worse.”
The hope dies where it stands.
“Because you didn’t lie to me out of fear,” I say. “You didn’t hide this because you were weak. You hid it because you believed you knew better than I did what I could survive.”
I step back. Creating distance. Deliberate.
“You didn’t trust me with my own life,” I say. “You trusted yourself with it.”
“That’s not?—”
“You waited,” I cut in. “You let him tell me. You let him define the choice. And you stood there and watched.”
Nightshade shakes his head, slow and disbelieving. “I was protecting you.”
“No,” I say. “You were managing me.”
The word lands like a body.
I turn slightly, enough that the others are in my peripheral vision.
“This is public,” I say, calm as ever. “Because what you did wasn’t private. You don’t get to explain it away in a corner this time. I gave you that with the tracker, but not this.”
Nightshade swallows.
I look back at him.
