“Is seeing me tortured still not enough proof they’re evil?” I kept my voice low. The question wasn’t a weapon. It was genuine.
Her jaw tightened. She pulled the second cuff off, and I bit down on the sound that tried to escape because the relief was physical enough to make my knees buckle.
“I’m not helping you because I think he’s evil.” She set the restraints on the concrete, careful, deliberate. Her eyes met mine. “I’m helping you because leaving a person in silver chains is wrong. That’s it. I’m choosing what’s right.”
I wanted to argue. But her hands were still trembling, and the look on her face wasn’t denial. It was a woman holding the center of her own moral compass while everyone around her tried to spin it.
So I kept my mouth shut. For once.
We moved through the compound in silence. She knew the layout better than I expected, guiding me through service corridors and storage rooms with the efficiency of someone who’d been mapping exit routes since she arrived. Which, knowing Mira, she probably had.
The eastern wall had a gap in camera coverage.
The tree line swallowed us in thirty seconds, and then we were running. Her hand in mine, her breathing ragged, the bond sparking with proximity after weeks. Every part of my body screamed to stay, to hold on, to pull her close and refuse to let go.
We stopped in a clearing half a mile from the perimeter. The distance already tugging at the connection, trying to drag it back to silence.
Mira turned to face me. Both of us breathing hard, the predawn air cold on our skin.
“Go,” she said.
“Come with me.”
“I can’t. If I run, he’ll hunt us both.”
I stepped closer. She didn’t step back. Her pulse was visible in her throat, jumping against the claiming marks that we put there and don’t deserve anymore. My hand came up and cupped her jaw, and the contact caused current through me so intense my fingers trembled.
“Maybe we’re not meant to be,” she said. “Too much history. Too much hurt.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know what I believe anymore.”
I kissed her.
The kind of kiss born from days of muted bonds and the specific agony of watching someone you’d die for tell you to leave. Shekissed me back with the same desperate fury, her fists twisting in my shirt, pulling me down, and my arms locked around her waist.
There was a taste of salt falling from her silent tears, her hands ripping free of my grip to fist in my shirt. I grabbed her waist, lifting her.
Mira’s legs wrapped around me in the same instinct, except this time there was no laughter or playfulness. This was anger made physical, the muted bond cracking under the pressure of proximity, and the flood of sensation that poured through was brutal.
Her pain. Concentrated, slamming into me.
My guilt, answering it.
I carried her backward until her spine hit a tree trunk. She gasped against my mouth but didn’t stop, her hands yanking my shirt over my head while her legs locked tighter. My mouth found her jaw, her throat, the claiming mark.
“This doesn’t mean I forgive you,” she said, her voice wrecked, her fingers digging into the tattoo lines across my shoulders.
“I know.”
“Stop agreeing with me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Her hands found my belt and answered without words.
I lowered us to the ground.
