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“You don’t get to think your way out of this,” I continue, stepping into him before he can open his mouth again. My chest brushes his, and for once, he’s the one with nowhere to retreat. “You don’t get to weigh outcomes or plan around my fear. You don’t get to negotiate.”

His eyes open.

Sharp. Dangerous. Already preparing to counter.

I don’t give him the chance.

“You’re taking me to Cass,” I say. Flat. Absolute. “Not later. Not when you think I’m ready. Now.”

“Selah—”

“No.”

The word cuts clean. Surgical. I feel it slice the air between us. The woods should’ve answered me. They didn’t.

“If you were trying to keep me alive, you failed the moment they spoke her name through my walls,” I go on, every word driven in like a nail. “You don’t get to protect me from this. You don’t get to decide what I can survive.”

The rain roars, hammering the ground hard enough that mud splashes our boots. Somewhere deep in the trees, something shifts—and then stills again, listening.

He glances past me. Calculates.

Finds nothing coming.

I smile without humor. “You feel that, don’t you? My scream didn’t call them in. It held them back.”

For the first time, he looks less like he wants to argue and more like he wants to deny something he already knows is true.

“That means whatever I am now,” I say, voice low and steady, “is already part of this war. With or without your permission.”

“I won’t take you if you’re a liability,” he says, voice dark, trying one last time to draw a line.

I step into it.

“You don’t get to decide that either,” I snap. “You don’t get to make my sister collateral and then tell me I’m too dangerous to walk into the fire.”

Silence slams down between us—dense, electric, armed.

“I’m going.” My voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t have to. “With you or without you. But if you make me walk into this alone, I’ll never forgive you.”

His eyes sharpen.

“And that’s what scares you, isn’t it?” I whisper. “Not that I’ll die. That I’ll survive without you.”

The rain runs off his lashes as his shoulders drop—not in defeat, but in acceptance. The kind that comes when every other path has already burned.

He steps closer. Not to block me. To align.

“Then hear this.” His voice iron and final. “Once we move, there’s no pulling you back. No stopping halfway.”

“Good.”

Thunder cracks overhead, carving the woods into bone and shadow. In the flash, we look like exactly what we are.

Two weapons pointed in the same direction.

“I’m not asking you to save me,” I say.

My voice goes quiet. Deadly calm.