Page 105 of Fractured Allegiance
She lifts her chin again. “Or to keep me under control?”
“I don’t care about control.”
“Then what do you care about?”
There’s no safe answer to that.
So I give her the real one.
“You.”
The word lands like a weight between us.
She doesn’t react the way I expect.
No shock. No breath caught in her throat. No retreat.
She just looks back at me, and I can almost hear her mind whirring. It’s like she’s trying to find the cost behind it. Can I blame her? No.
Then she turns away and walks to the window, standing with her arms folded, back rigid. The kind of stillness that’s trying not to break something inside it.
I follow her.
And now we’re standing face to face.
The paper’s still on the table.
But neither of us looks at it.
Because this, whatever’s between us right now is the real danger.
And we both feel it.
She doesn’t move away.
Not this time.
She stands in front of me with her spine straight, eyes alert, expression carved out of something old and unfinished. Not armor. Not performance. Just the kind of resilience that gets built when you’ve been gutted too clean to bleed.
I should walk away. Put space between us before the truth slips out of my mouth and burns the whole operation down around it.
But I don’t.
I stay right where I am, the air between us beginning to charge. Her breath still tastes like distance. Her silence, more cutting than anything she said aloud.
She folds her arms, but not defensively. It’s more like she’s holding herself in place. “You don’t strike me as the type to unravel for no reason,” she says. “So what is this?”
“This?”
She nods toward the coffee table, at the letter. The line written by a hand that knew how to get too close without leaving a fingerprint.
“Is this your unraveling?”
I don’t answer.
Because I already know the answer.
It is.
