“By making me forget you?”
“By making sure you live.”
“I’m alive now!” My voice cracks, and I don’t care. “You don’t get to decide what parts of my life are expendable!”
His eyes flash, and I see the terror in them, how he’s drowning in fear.
“You think I want this?” he demands, stepping closer. “You think I want to watch you look at me like I am a stranger? To stand there while you forget my name?”
“Then why?” I fire back. “Why would you even consider it?”
“Because I have seen what he does.”
The fury drains from his face, replaced by something darker.
Memory.
“When I fled, I watched him burn villages behind me,” he says, quieter now. “I watched him drag women into the streets. I watched children die because someone whispered they were loyal to me. I know what my uncle is capable of. What he turns love into.”
His grip tightens around the amulet.
“If he kills me, if I fail, he will come after you next. He’ll destroy you in my name and not just you. Your mother too. Your aunt. Anyone who shares blood with you. You think I can live with that on my conscience? That even in death I would accept so much blood on my hands?”
The words sit heavy between us.
“I would rather be nothing to you,” he says hoarsely, “than be the reason you suffer. The reason you die.”
The bond thrums, and I feel it. His turmoil. His pain. The raw devotion of his love for me.
“You don’t get to choose for me,” I say, quieter but no less fierce. “You do not get to decide that my safety is worth the erasure of my memories. Of my love.”
His throat works.
“I am not choosing ignorance for you. I am choosing survival.”
“You are choosing control. You’re taking control away from me.”
He flinches at that. At the naked truth in it.
“I am choosing sacrifice,” he snaps back. “Mine.”
“You don’t get to sacrifice me to do it.”
The air crackles between us. Tense and frustrated and angry.
Veskar watches, his expression unreadable.
“I would rather you hate me,” Sorren says, his voice breaking, “than bury you.”
“And I would rather face death with my eyes open,” I reply, my voice steady despite the storm inside me, “than live safely without knowing who I am.”
I step into his space. Close enough that he has to either retreat or stand his ground.
“You think you are giving me life,” I say, lifting a finger between us, “but you are taking from me, stripping me of the very thing I value most.”
I press that finger to his chest.
“The right to choose who I am.”
