“I’m not walking away,” I said, meeting his gaze. “I’m stepping aside. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?” Braesal’s voice was soft now, almost gentle, but there was steel beneath it. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running.”
“Call it what you want,” I said finally. “The result is the same. The IRA needs a leader who wants to lead it. Who believes init. Who’s willing to sacrifice everything for it. That person is not me. It never was.”
“And you think it’s me?” Braesal asked, his expression unreadable.
“I know it is.”
The silence that followed was different from before. Heavier. More contemplative. Braesal studied me, his eyes searching for something. Truth, maybe. Or weakness. Or some sign that this was a trick, a manipulation, another move in the endless game.
“You’ve thought this through,” he said finally. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes.”
“And Sinclair agrees?”
I felt Sinclair’s hand tighten slightly on the back of my chair. “I do.”
“Why?” The question came from Morpheus as his scarred face twisted with suspicion. “What’s in it for you, Sinclair? You don’t do anything without a reason.”
Sinclair’s smile was thin, almost sad. “I do it because he asked me to. Because for once in my life, I’m choosing to help someone get what they want rather than what I think they need.”
His words settled over the room like snow, quiet, cold, transformative. I’d never heard Sinclair speak like that before. Never heard him admit to anything resembling sentiment or selflessness. It was so unlike him, and for a moment I wondered if this was another manipulation, another layer to the game. But then I remembered the conversation we’d had three months ago, in the back of a car in the middle of nowhere. The way he’d looked at me when I’d told him what I wanted. The way his expression had shifted from calculation to something akin to understanding.
“You want out,”he’d said.
“I want her,”I’d replied.
“Same thing,”he’d murmured. “In the end, it’s always the same thing.”
Cesar broke the silence first. “And what happens to the alliances? The agreements we have with the IRA?”
“They transfer to Braesal,” Sinclair stated. “Everything transfers. The territories, the operations, the connections. All of it.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
Morpheus leaned forward, his eyes hard. “And what about you? Where do you go? What do you do?”
The question I’d been dreading. I had plans, vague, half-formed ideas about teaching again, about building a life with Melissa, about finding some way to exist outside this world. But plans weren’t certainties. And in this world, uncertainty was death.
“I’m going back to New York,” I said carefully. “I want to return to teaching. To live a quiet life.”
“A quiet life,” Morpheus repeated, his tone making it clear what he thought of that idea. “You really think they’ll let you? You really think you can just walk away and no one will come after you?”
“They will if I tell them he’s off-limits.”
All eyes turned to Braesal.
He sat there, perfectly still, his expression giving nothing away. The firelight played across his features, casting shadows that made him look older, harder, more dangerous than he’d seemed moments before.
This was the moment. The fulcrum on which everything balanced.
If he refused, if he rejected what I was offering, then everything I’d done for the past six months would be for nothing. The plan would collapse. The alliances would fracture. And I’dbe trapped in this life forever, watching Melissa from a distance, unable to touch her, unable to claim her, unable to keep the promise I’d made.
But if he accepted...
