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I grab the edge of his armor to steady myself. “I’m scared.”

His expression changes at once. “I know.”

“No, I mean I am scared of this.” I gesture between us, and the absurdity of doing that while the chamber fractures around us almost makes me laugh. “Not just dying, though I am absolutely not a fan of that option. I am scared of needing you. I am scared of how much calmer I feel when you are close. I am scared that after spending my whole life making sure nobody could turn my soft parts into leverage, you walked into a hazard zone, looked mildly annoyed, and somehow became every soft part I had left.”

His breath leaves him in a rough sound.

A shot strikes the stone near us. Fragments sting my cheek. Ghar pulls me closer with one arm, fires over my shoulder, and then looks down at me like the battle has become an insult interrupting something sacred we no longer need a god to name.

“Anita,” he says, and my name sounds different now.

I press on before courage leaks out through my boots. “The universe may be absurd. It may be a cosmic accident with bad documentation. The bond may be biology. It may be Precursor meddling. It may be First One residue. It may be some horrible combination of all three plus whatever nonsense my nervous system is doing because you have cheekbones and a moral injury.”

His eyes widen slightly. “My cheekbones?”

“I am confessing profound emotional truth. Do not get hung up on anatomy.”

“I would not dare.”

“Good.” My fingers tighten on his armor. “Because none of that changes what this feels like to me. It feels real, Ghar. Not sacred because someone assigned it from above. Not meaningful because the universe put a certificate on it. Real because I am here, and you are here, and we keep choosing each other when fear gives us so many easier exits.”

The chamber shakes again.

Ghar lowers his weapon for half a breath, not enough to leave us exposed, but enough that his full attention lands on me. His control is still there, but it no longer looks like a wall. It looks like discipline making room for tenderness.

“You no longer hide from me,” he says softly.

“I am considering hiding again immediately after this conversation.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. I have seen you now.”

The words strike me gently and devastate me completely.

I have been admired before. Dismissed, desired, underestimated, used, praised, and professionally tolerated in small doses. I have had people want my mind as long as it stayed dazzling and impersonal. I have had people enjoy my wit until it cut them. I have not been seen like this, with my brilliance and fear and arrogance and longing all held in one gaze without someone trying to separate the useful parts from the inconvenient ones.

My eyes burn. “That sounds dangerous.”

“It is,” he says. “I am not gentle with enemies, Anita. I am not easy. I am made of wars I did not escape cleanly, and even now, I do not know how much of the man beside you was forged by beliefs that no longer stand.”

I reach up and touch the burned line at his jaw, careful of the damaged skin. “Then let me tell you what I see.”

His throat moves.

“I see a man who had every excuse to become nothing but a weapon and didn’t. I see someone who can stand in front of violence without worshiping it, which is rarer than most civilized people want to admit. I see someone whose faith collapsed and who still chose mercy, still chose me, still chose not to let despair write his next action.”

His eyes close briefly against my hand.

When he opens them, the tenderness there is so open that my breath falters. Ghar, who has spent most of this nightmare locking every feeling behind discipline and scar tissue, looks at me with no armor at all where it matters.

“I love you,” he says.

There is no ceremony in it. No thunder. No ancient chorus. He says it in a collapsing archive with blood on his armor and gunfire echoing through impossible stone, and the plainness of it hits harder than any sacred vow could have.

I make a sound that embarrasses me instantly.