His voice is calm. Steady. Like we're discussing tactical doctrine instead of murder.
My hand tightens. I feel his heartbeat. Fast, but not panicked. He's not afraid of me. He should be afraid of me.
"But you won't," he adds.
"Why not?"
His hand comes up. Wraps around my wrist. Not pulling me away. Not fighting. Just... holding.
"Because you need answers more than you need revenge." His electric blue eyes hold mine. "And because you want to know if I'd leave you again."
The truth lands like a blade between ribs.
I release him. Step back. Stand.
Everything in me is screaming. Kill him. Kiss him. Run. Stay. Choose something, anything, stop standing here with my heart trying to beat out of my chest and my hands shaking with adrenaline and want and rage.
He rises. Slow. Hands visible. Not threatening. Not yielding either.
The space between us is three feet. Might as well be three light-years.
"Webb has been spotted," I hear myself say. My voice sounds almost normal. "Station Gamma-7. Two jumps from here."
"Then we should go."
"We should."
I look at him. Really look at him. The man who left me. The man who came to my door last night. The man whose pulse I just felt under my hand, whose throat I could have crushed.
"But understand this." My voice is steady now. Cold. The voice I use when I'm about to do something that can't be undone. "If this is a trap, if Webb has help, if the situation goes sideways—I'm not leaving anyone behind. Even if the math says I should."
He goes very still.
His marks dim, not to darkness, but to something more dangerous. The low, steady glow of an Empri who's just shifted into tactical mode. Into the space where feeling stops and calculation begins. I've seen this before. On Sigma-9. Right before he made the choice that broke us both.
"That's not tactically sound," he says. His voice has flattened. Clinical. The tone he uses when he's assessing probabilities and outcomes and acceptable losses.
"No."
I smile. I feel my lips curve, feel the shape of it—all edges, no warmth, the expression that makes recruits check their weapons and take a step back. The smile I learned after Sigma-9. The one that says I've already calculated what I'm willing to lose.
"But it's who I am." Each word lands deliberately. A declaration of principle. A line in the fucking sand. "You left me once. I won't be the person who does that to someone else. Not ever."
The air between us crackles with something I can't name. Can't afford to name.
The line is drawn. Has been drawn. Six years of distance and damage and the fundamental difference in who we became after that mission.
Her morality against his.
One of us is going to break.
The question is which one, and what it'll cost when we do. What it'll cost the mission, the station, the fragile alliance we're supposed to be rebuilding. What it'll cost the people depending on us to not let this—us—get in the way of survival.
I walk past him.
Deliberately close. Close enough that I can smell him—gun oil and that fucking military-issue antiseptic he never stopped using and something underneath that's justhim. The scent I've tried to forget for six years. The one I've never been able to scrub from my memory no matter how many showers I took, how many strangers I killed, how many nights I spent trying to replace the ghost of it with anything else.
My shoulder brushes his arm. Brief contact.
