"Stay," I say.
"Wasn't planning on leaving."
We lay together in the dark. His arms around me, my head on his chest. The building settles. Midnight passes.
I'm almost asleep when the bolt slides.
Not Leo's trick — Leo is beside me, his body going rigid at the sound. Someone on the outside. The scrape of metal. Forced. The sound of someone who figured out the mechanism through sheer desperation.
Leo sits up. The amber flaring in his eyes.
Gray.
He's standing in the doorway in a Gold House shirt and sleep pants and open boots and his hair is wrecked and his eyes are red and his face is —
The war is over.
The war is lost.
He's standing in a Red House doorway at one in the morning having walked across a frozen compound with no socks, the discipline finally breaking under the weight of the thing he's been trying to crush since I walked past his window.
He sees Leo. On the bed. Beside me.
He doesn't leave.
His chest is heaving. His hands are shaking. The bottoms of his feet are raw and red from the frozen ground.
And what comes out of his mouth isn't careful or architectural.
"I can't," he says. Broken. Raw. "I tried. I can't."
Leo stands up. Not to leave. Not to challenge.
He stands and steps to the side and makes space.
Gray looks at him like he expects a fight. Leo doesn't give him one.
"Get in here," Leo says. "Close the door."
Gray steps in. Closes the door. Stands in my room and looks at me the way a drowning man looks at the surface.
"I'm sorry," he says. "For the path. For what I said —"
"You said you didn't want it."
My voice comes out flat. Not cruel — honest. The way it sounds when you've been carrying something for weeks and someone finally shows up to ask about it.
"You said you were choosing not to do this. You said don't say my name like you know me. You said I was just a girl who walked past a window."
He flinches.
Each sentence lands like a blow.
Good.
He should hear them back. He should hear what they sounded like from this side.
"And then you walked away. And then you walked away again in the lodge hallway after you grabbed my wrist and said sorry and I stood there watching you leave with your mark lit up like a fucking flare and I couldn't —"
