I grab her face, hard enough that her teeth click, forcing her to look at me through the tears streaking tracks through the dirt.
“It wasn’t fucking wrong,” I snap, each word bitten off. “Don’t rewrite it. Don’t cheapen it. Don’t lie to me now.”
Her breath stutters.
“We didn’t imagine it,” I go on, voice dropping, dangerous and steady. “You didn’t cry into my shoulder because it was wrong. You didn’t whisper my name in the dark because it was a mistake.”
She chokes on a sob. “We were kids?—”
“No,” I cut in immediately. “We were already broken. There’s a difference.”
My thumb digs into her jaw, not cruel, not gentle—claiming.
“What’s wrong,” I say quietly, “is pretending you can erase something that carved itself into both of us.”
The rotors thunder closer. The light sweeps the tree-line again, harsher now. Real. Counting down.
She shakes under my hands.
“I don’t want this,” she whispers. “I don’t want you like this. I don’t want to be this person.”
I lean in, my forehead pressing to hers, breath rough.
“You already are,” I say. “You’ve been her the whole time.”
Her hands clutch weakly at my wrists, not pushing, not pulling—caught.
“This ends one way, Scarlett,” I repeat, lower now. “With you walking away with me—or with everything else breaking around us until there’s nowhere left to stand.”
Her eyes search my face like she’s looking for mercy and finding none.
“Kai…” she sobs. “Please.”
The word hits, but it doesn’t slow me. It locks me in.
I straighten, grip tightening around her wrist as the sound of boots and voices begin to bleed through the jungle.
“They’re closing in,” I say. “This is the last clean second you get.”
I hold her gaze.
“Choose,” I tell her again. “Now.”
Her knees finally give.
She doesn’t collapse all the way—just enough that I feel the weight of it through my grip, her body sagging like something cut loose from its spine. She’s sobbing now, properly sobbing, sound ripped out of her in jagged, humiliating pulls.
“I can’t,” she keeps saying, over and over. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t—Kai, this was wrong. It was wrong back then and it’s wrong now and I can’t keep doing this.”
The words hit me like teeth.
I let go of her wrist only to grab her shoulders, shaking her once—hard. Not to hurt. To wake her.
“Look at me,” I snap.
She does. Reluctant. Wrecked. Her face is a mess—mud, tears, fear—and it splits something open in my chest I don’t have language for.
“Don’t say that,” I growl. “Don’t you dare fucking say it was wrong.”
