I offered no reply.
I couldn’t, not really. The words eluded me, or perhaps there were too many of them.
“Because you’re not my cup of tea” still resonated. It lingered at the core of everything that had transpired since, radiating, occupying a space I hadn’t realized I’d cleared until he filled it, only to tell me in the same breath that I didn’t belong there.
“But—” he continued, his tone shifting, hardening. The soldier within him stepped forward, efficiently taking command. “Don’t get attached to me, Libby.”
I met his gaze fully.
“Finn—”
“I mean it,” he said, not harshly, not with manufactured distance, but with a settled conviction. “I don’t want to hurt you. I’m not saying this to manipulate you. I mean it as plainly as I know how.”
A flicker crossed his eyes then—quick, unguarded, and profoundly real—revealing everything the rest of him was striving to conceal.
He caught it, reining it back. But not before I’d seen it, already tucking it away in the quiet corner where I kept all the parts of him he hadn’t intended to show me.
“And until we reach somewhere even remotely safe,” he added, his words clipped and careful, as if rationed, “I need to stay focused. Completely. I can’t afford to—”
The sentence dissolved unfinished, swallowed by the remnants of his composure.
But I heard what he left unsaid. Heard it in the silence that followed.
I can’t afford to care about you the way I’m starting to.
Hurt now sat in my throat, accompanied by something else: understanding. And the fear he’d just handed me by naming his own.
He shifted beneath me.
“I need you to promise me something.”
I froze, my thumb ceasing its small, unconscious movement against his shirt.
“What?”
“If it comes down to it…” He spoke slowly, each word chosen with a deliberateness that suggested careful rehearsal. “If I have to make a call. If I have to get you, Fiona, and Lily out of whatever it is we’re walking into—”
A muscle in his jaw jumped beneath the skin, a small, involuntary betrayal of everything he was working to keep contained.
“I need to know you’ll let me do it. That you won’t try to stop me or save me. I need you to let me protect you.”
I didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. Somewhere in the room, a clock ticked, a sound I hadn’t noticed before.
“Finn—”
“I need you to promise me.” His voice dropped, raw and stripped of all defense. His grip tightened on my arms—not enough to bruise or hurt, but enough that I felt every individual finger, every point of contact, every ounce of desperation bleeding into his hands even as he fought to keep it from hisvoice. “If I tell you to go, you go immediately. You don’t slow down, you don’t stop to look back, you don’t stand there waiting to see how it ends. You take them and you move, and you don’t stop moving.”
His eyes locked onto mine, holding them, refusing to let me look away, soften the directness, or retreat into something easier.
Not cold.
Not distant.
Terrified. Openly, visibly, undeniably terrified.
“I need to know you’ll actually listen to me when it matters,” he said. “That you won’t hesitate. That you’ll take them and go, and you won’t look back, and you won’t wait for something that might not—”
He stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished. He didn’t need to.
