“Isla–”
“I said don’t.” But my voice had gone wrong. Too thin. The anger completely gone, and underneath it everything I hadn’t let myself feel in front of anyone; not Lena, not Gideon, not even alone in my suite last night.
The exhaustion of the last month. The bloodline. My father’s letter. The question I couldn’t stop asking. Eight years of a love that had been real even though it had ended in wreckage.
Then the tears came anyway.
I turned away from him. Pressed both hands to the wall and just let it happen. The ugly, gasping kind. The kind I had been holding back since I was fifteen years old in the ashes of the Beta house.
I heard him move.
“Don’t touch me,” I managed.
He stopped.
Then… slowly, in the way of someone who understood they had no right but was going to anyway…
