"Anything."
"Don't say that yet. You don't know what it is." She sets her jaw. "Tomorrow. If it goes bad. If it comes down to me or the women—you get the women out."
"Mila—"
"You saidanything." She doesn't blink.
"You can't ask me that."
"I can. I am. And you're going to say yes." Her face is dead calm, calmer than I can make mine. "Listen. This whole time you've known me, I've been teaching you one thing, whether you realized it or not."
I wait.
"That you don't get to decide for me." She keeps her eyes level on mine. "Every time somebody decided for me to keep me safe, it cost me a piece of my life. I'm done being kept. And you learned it. You learned it so well you got on your knees in a garage and let me hand you back your own guilt because I asked you to."
"That's different."
"It's exactly the same." She takes my face in both hands. Her hands are cold, and they don't shake. "I made a promise to a girl behind a door. Volveré. And you're the one person alive who could make me break it. Because you'd choose me."
"Mila—"
"I know you would." She presses on before I can. "If it came down to me bleeding out and eleven women still in the ground, you'd choose me and never think twice, and I would rather die on that property than live knowing you traded them for me."
My eyes are burning and there's nothing I can do about it.
"So promise me. You get them out. All of them. Even if the cost is me." She holds my face steady. "Because if you save me and lose them, you don't save me. You keep the body. The part worth keeping dies on that ground the second you make the wrong choice."
I sit there with her cold hands on my face and the whole desert black behind her.
She's not going to let me out of it.
And she's right, which is worse.
"Okay," I say.
"Say it."
"I get them out." It comes out of me like it's torn loose from somewhere. "Even if it's you. I promise. I get them out."
"Thank you." She presses her forehead to mine. "That's the last thing I'll ever make you decide for me. Everything after, I decide. But that one's yours, because I can't trust myself to hold to it, and I trust you."
We sit like that. Forehead to forehead. Breathing.
"Finn."
"Yeah."
"I love you."
I go still.
She's never said it. Not once.
I said it to a room full of men before I ever got to say it to her, and she's known that.
Everybody's known it, and she's let it sit there unanswered for weeks.
Because she doesn't say a word until she means it all the way to the floor.
