Tur watches me run command like he’s watching a live feed of a reality he didn’t know was possible.
“You don’t hesitate,” he says quietly as we stand over a map covered in grease pencil routes and color-coded supply lines.
“I’m done hesitating,” I reply. “It was never a luxury I could afford.”
He studies my face like he’s memorizing it against future grief.
“You’re building an insurgency out of a restaurant.”
“I always said food service teaches transferable skills.”
He huffs.
Then his hand slides into mine under the table.
The bond hums low and steady.
Love stops being theoretical sometime around hour fourteen of coordinated chaos, when I catch him hauling crates with civilians, taking orders from Mara without ego, and standing guard outside the tunnel entrance at three in the morning like this is his job now and always was.
We don’t say anything about it.
We don’t have to.
By the time the sun comes up over a city that no longer belongs to the Nine, I’m standing in front of a crowd of exhausted, armed, furious people who are waiting to see what I do next.
I don’t pretend survival is enough anymore.
“We’re not hiding,” I tell them. “We’re not begging. And we’re not giving this city back to the people who burned it.”
They cheer.
Tur steps up beside me.
Whatever this is now, it’s bigger than both of us.
CHAPTER 28
TUR
The city still smolders, bleeding red and orange into the sky like it’s been gut-shot and left to die. But in the safehouse—bare bones, bare walls, barely habitable—it’s quiet.
The kind of quiet you don't trust. The kind that presses against your ribs like it’s waiting to be broken.
Kim lays next to me on the pallet. The makeshift mattress creaks under every shift of her weight. My fingers trace slow lines down her spine, memorizing the places where soot hasn’t touched her. She’s warm, sweat-slicked, alive—and for reasons that defy biology, physics, and every rule the Alliance ever tried to beat into me, she’s mine.
Not because of the bond.
Because she chose to stay.
“You keep lookin’ at me like you lost a bet,” she murmurs, voice low and scratchy from smoke and sleep.
“I keep thinking I’ll blink and you’ll vanish.”
“I don’t do vanishing acts,” she says. “Stage fright.”
I huff out a breath that’s almost a laugh. Her hair tickles my chest. It smells like industrial soap and burned cumin and her. Just her.
Her palm flattens over my ribs. Skin to skin. Her thumb brushes the edge of a scar I don’t remember earning. I remember too many. That one’s a mystery.
