My voice cracks.
I clamp it down.
"You don't get to show up at one in the morning and sayI can'tlike that covers it."
"It doesn't."
He's still in the middle of the room. Not approaching. Not retreating.
His hands are trembling and his voice is stripped of every layer of control I've ever heard on him.
"Nothing covers it."
"Then talk," I say. "Say the actual words. You owe me that."
He takes a breath. It shakes coming out.
"I told you to stay away from me when my body already knew you were mine," he says. "I stood in front of you and said I didn't want it. I said don't say my name. I said you were just a girl who walked past a window."
His voice breaks.
"I made you stand there and hear that."
The room goes still.
"I was cruel."
No deflection. No excuse.
"I was a coward who dressed control up as strength and called it discipline."
He drags a hand down his face.
"I was on a path," he says. "Six months from reintegration review. Frosthaven was the goal — not this compound, not Gold House, the actual academy. I was going to be the one who made it out. The proof that the system works. That a feral can claw his way back to human and stay there."
His jaw works.
"I was so focused on that — on being perfect, on graduating, on the timeline — that I forgot everything else. Everyone else."
He looks at the floor.
At his hands.
At the wall.
Anywhere but at me.
"RJ is in a room three hallways from here because I left him there. My pack brother. The man I survived the mountain with. He's been in chains for months and I walked past his buildingevery day on my way to sessions where I practiced holding my form."
His voice thins.
"I told myself it was the right thing. That getting out was how I helped. That if I graduated, I could come back for him."
A hollow breath leaves him.
"That was the lie I told myself so I could sleep while he hit walls."
Leo shifts beside me. Something moves across his face that I can't read.
