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“You are not Salvatore.”

“No.” The word scraped my throat. “He was braver.”

Rurik’s face hardened. “Don’t insult me by pretending this is courage.”

Anger steadied me where grief couldn’t. “You kidnapped me, locked me inside a house, and decided fear gave you the right to control my life. Now you want to lecture me about choice?”

“Yes.”

The answer disarmed me.

“I would take you again,” he continued. “I would lock every door and stand guard outside this house if captivity could guarantee you survived. But you taught me that protection without consent can still be betrayal. I heard you. I will not make every decision for you.” His voice lowered. “But your name is already on their list, Madigan. I will not stand beside you while you make their job easier.”

“I’m not trying to die.”

“No. You’re trying to convince yourself that because they already chose you, what happens next is inevitable.”

My throat tightened.

“It isn’t,” he said. “They authorized your death. That does not mean they get to have it.”

The truth hurt more than accusation. I had given Henry to Illyria, placed my forgiveness in her hands, and asked her to explain me after I was gone. I wanted to go to Boston so my mother would have one final memory in which I wasn’t hiding. I had called those choices protection because admitting they were farewells made them unbearable.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “Pretend Reagan didn’t show us that order? Convince myself love makes me untouchable?”

“I want you to stop speaking as if your death belongs only to you.”

“It does.”

“No.” His voice broke around the word. “It does not.”

Silence followed. Rurik looked away, but the confession had already entered the space between us. He had not said he loved me. He didn’t need to. Love lived in the restraint with which he guarded me, in the anger shaking his hands, and in the terrible fear he could no longer conceal.

I had recognized it before that night. Perhaps I had recognized it before he did. I had simply allowed him to remain silent because unspoken love required nothing from the person unable to return it.

“Rurik.”

“Don’t.”

“You love me.”

His jaw tightened. He stared through the windshield, offering me one final chance to pretend I hadn’t understood.

The knowledge frightened me more than his anger. Rurik’s love had gathered quietly in untouched coffee, doors guarded through the night, and every moment he stopped his hand before touching me because consent mattered more after he had once taken it away. Accepting what he offered felt like another form of theft.

I couldn’t use his silence to protect myself anymore.

“Yes,” he said.

The simplicity devastated me. There was no seduction in it, no hope disguised as certainty. He spoke the truth the way Reagan had placed the containment order before me, knowing neither of us could return to ignorance once I held it.

“Don’t,” I whispered.

“It is too late.”

“I can’t give you what you want.”

“You don’t know what I want.”