Chapter 1202: Say it plainly

"I didn’t know you’d use it as an excuse to leave me alone."

Lucavion’s expression tightened.

"It wasn’t an excuse."

Jesse stared at him. "Then what was it?"

"A reason."

The distinction came quietly, without the trace of humor he might once have used to make it easier to swallow.

Lucavion glanced toward the open edge of the terrace, where the wind moved over the low wall and carried the distant noise of the Academy away beneath them.

"I couldn’t return to Loria," he said. "Not without being caught."

"I know that."

"And when I found you here, the situation hadn’t become simpler. There were people watching me before I had been at the Academy for a week. Some of them wanted information. Others wanted leverage." His eyes returned to hers. "I didn’t know which one you would become if they saw us together."

He had seen Jesse standing with the Lorian delegation, protected by her own position and surrounded by people who recognized her authority. Approaching her openly would have tied her to him again before he understood what that connection might cost.

It was the sort of reasoning Jesse might once have admired.

’He still thinks I don’t understand.’

Jesse’s nails pressed into her palms.

"I knew you could manage without me," Lucavion continued. "You already had. I thought leaving you outside what followed me was the least damaging choice."

The least damaging choice.

Her heartbeat had begun striking too hard in her chest, each beat driving his words deeper instead of carrying them away.

He had heard about command. The searches. The Seventeenth. Shale.

"You thought," she said.

Lucavion paused.

"I thought coming back into your life without knowing what I would bring with me would have been selfish."

That word finished what the rest had started.

Selfish.

As if leaving her with no warning had been restraint, and the cost somehow cleaner because he had not stayed close enough to witness it.

Jesse crossed the space between them.

"STOP MAKING EXCUSES!"

Her shout struck the terrace walls and returned in a broken echo. Before Lucavion could answer, her hand had already closed around his collar, twisting the dark fabric in her fist and wrenching him down until his face was level with hers.

For the first time, Lucavion looked startled.

His hands rose on instinct, not toward a weapon but toward her wrists. They stopped before touching her. Jesse saw the decision pass through him, saw his fingers loosen and fall back to his sides while she held him by the collar.

That restraint only made her angrier.

"Don’t give me that shit," she spat. "Don’t stand there explaining that world to me like I wasn’t there."

"Jesse—"

"I was fucking there."

Her fist struck his chest.

There was no stance behind it, no weight transferred through her hips. It was not a soldier’s blow or anything Lucavion had taught her. She hit him because her anger had filled every other place it could occupy.

He absorbed it without moving.

"You thought I would manage?"

His mouth thinned. "I knew you would."

Jesse hit him again.

"I did."

The impact drove a dull ache through her knuckles.

"I fucking managed."

Lucavion’s gaze never left her face. That calm, his damned, patient calm, made the pressure inside her climb until she could scarcely breathe around it.

"And now what?" She dragged him closer by the collar. "Look at me. Look where that brought us."

"I’m looking."

"Then answer me!"

The words tore out of her, too loud for the narrow terrace and too raw to control once they had begun. Years of questions followed behind them, no longer arranged in the careful order she had carried through frozen marches and sleepless nights.

"How many people did I have to kill after you left? How many more was enough?"

Lucavion’s face changed, but Jesse could no longer stop to read how.

"How many nights did I sleep alone, thinking you’d come back? How many mornings did I wake up and realize you hadn’t?"

Her grip shook. She hated that he could feel it. Hated the heat building behind her eyes and the weakness entering her voice, but she had swallowed both for too many years to force them down again.

"I kept waiting."

The admission hurt more than the shouting.

Jesse struck his chest once more, weaker this time, and left her fist pressed there. Beneath cloth and muscle, his heartbeat remained steady against her knuckles.

"I waited when command questioned me. I waited when they sent me away. I waited in Shale." Her breath caught, and anger forced it loose again. "Every time someone came looking for me, some stupid part of me thought it might be you."

Lucavion said nothing.

"Say something."

His lips parted.

Jesse tightened her hold before another careful explanation could emerge.

"No. Not another reason. Not what was safer. Not what you thought was best for me."

She pulled him nearer until scarcely a breath remained between them. The wind moved around them now, unable to pass through the space she had closed.

"Tell me why you chose for me. Tell me why being able to survive meant I deserved to do it alone."

His expression had gone still.

Jesse’s fist remained against his chest, trembling with everything she had not managed to strike out of herself.

"Answer me truthfully," she said, her voice breaking low and vicious.

Lucavion drew a breath.

"I..."

Nothing followed.

Jesse waited, close enough to feel the unfinished word leave him as breath. His eyes moved across her face as though the answer might be found somewhere in what she wanted from him.

"I—"

He stopped there again.

Jesse took it differently this time. Lucavion could not force the words past whatever stood behind them, and the sight might have softened her if she had not already known the answer.

After Valeria, who had his whole attention the instant he realized he had misjudged her; after Elowyn, whose temper he endured while listening beneath it; after the care he gave Princess Priscilla expecting nothing in return, and the way his gaze had followed Isolde from the Entrance Banquet, the pattern was plain.

When Lucavion wanted to remain near someone, he found reasons. When they needed space he waited within reach, and when danger gathered he stepped closer. He had done none of that for Jesse.

"Just say it, you bastard."

His gaze sharpened.

"You didn’t care enough."

Saying it hurt. Jesse drove the words forward anyway, because pain did not make them false, not from where she had stood.

"You didn’t care enough then to tell me you were leaving. You didn’t care enough afterward to find some way to contact me." Her fist tightened, dragging the collar harder against his throat. "And when I was standing in the same fucking Academy, close enough that you could have crossed a hall and spoken to me, you still didn’t care enough to come."

"That isn’t—"

"Stop."

Her voice dropped, roughened by everything the shouting had torn loose.

"Stop lying to yourself."

Lucavion went silent.

Jesse searched his face for anger, denial, anything that would make the answer easier to hate. She found neither. Only that terrible stillness, and beneath it whatever she could no longer afford to read kindly.

"You found ways to be around everyone else." The names crowded behind her teeth, each carrying an image she had tried not to preserve. "You noticed what they needed. You stayed."

Her grip began to ache. She welcomed it.

"But not for me."

The terrace blurred at its edges. Jesse blinked once and forced it back into place: the low stone wall, the black cloth gathered inside her fist.

She could survive the answer, or so she told herself.

"It’s fine," she said, though nothing in her voice sounded fine. "You don’t have to protect me from this too."

Lucavion’s brow drew down.

"I can take it."

She pulled him the last fraction closer, until their foreheads nearly touched.

"Say you didn’t care enough."

"Say it plainly."

Whatever answer Lucavion had been trying to find disappeared.

His eyes widened slowly, a realization forming behind his gaze and stripping the stillness from his face, nothing like the offense or instinctive denial Jesse had braced to hear.

Jesse felt her grip falter.

Lucavion looked like a man who had only just heard the question clearly.

His attention left her without turning away, drawn inward toward a place he had never thought to examine. The careful distinctions were gone. So were the reasons.

Several seconds passed.

Then Lucavion lowered his eyes to the fist twisted in his collar.

When he spoke, it was barely above a mutter.

"You are right."