I look down. He's right. A fine tremor runs through my fingers, visible even in the low light. I curl them into fists, but that only makes the shaking more obvious. My whole body feels wrong, depleted in a way that goes beyond physical exhaustion. I moved faster tonight than I have in decades, burned through reserves I didn't know I was still capable of accessing. And for what?
"You're not reacting like a commander who lost control of an operation," Marcellus says quietly. "You're reacting like this was personal. Like she was personal."
"She could have died." The words tear out of me, raw and jagged. "He had her by the throat, feet off the ground, and I wasn't fast enough. If I'd been a few seconds later…"
"But you weren't."
"But I could have been." I meet his eyes. "I sent her in there knowing what might happen. I calculated the risks, positioned the teams, accounted for variables. And then I stood in my study watching a screen while six vampires tried to kill her."
"You got there. You saved her."
"I'm the reason she needed saving. And then I threw away the only thing that could have justified it." I stare at the whiskey I haven't touched. "I was supposed to capture them. That was the plan. Get intelligence, make it mean something. Instead, I killed every single one of them without a thought."
"Why?"
"Because I saw her bleeding, and I stopped thinking. All my discipline. All my careful control. Gone the moment she was in danger."
The admission costs me something. I've spent my entire existence cultivating control, building walls, learning to make the cold calculation, even when everything in me screamed against it. Tonight proved that all of it was an illusion. One woman bleeding in an alley, and I became the monster I've spent lifetimes trying to bury.
Marcellus is quiet for a moment. "What did she say? When you told her?"
"I didn't have to tell her. She figured it out." The memory of her face cuts through me. "She asked me to leave."
"And?"
"And I left. What else could I do?"
He leans back in his chair, studying me. "I've known you a long time. I've seen you lose battles, lose territory, lose people you valued. I've never seen you like this."
"Like what?"
"Lost."
The word settles between us. He's not wrong. I am lost. For the first time in longer than I can remember, I have no plan, no strategy, no careful calculation to guide me. There's only the wreckage of what I've done and the look in her eyes when she told me she didn't know if I could make it right.
"She trusted me," I say. "That's what she said. She trusted me."
"Did you trust her?"
The question catches me off guard. "What?"
"Did you trust her? If you had, you would have told her the truth. Let her decide whether to take the risk. Instead, you made the choice for her." He leans forward. "You didn't just use her as bait. You decided she couldn't handle the truth."
I want to argue. Want to explain that I was protecting her, that I needed her reactions to be genuine, that it was tactically necessary.
But he's right. Underneath all the justifications, I didn't trust her enough to give her the choice.
"I've taken her off field duty," I say. "Until she's fully healed."
Marcellus raises an eyebrow. "She'll be furious."
"I know."
"She'll see it as you controlling her again. Making decisions for her without asking."
"I know." I finally pick up the whiskey, though I don't drink it. Just hold it, feeling the weight of the glass in my hand. "But I can't send her back out there. Not yet. Maybe not ever. The thought of her in danger again…"
"That's not strategy. That's fear."
