“I didn’t answer,” I correct. “I’m… considering how to use the offer.”
He stares at me, and I see the moment he decides something, the way command decisions settle in his posture.
“Then we end this,” he says abruptly.
My stomach clenches. “What.”
“I will rescind my investigation requests,” Rhyx says, voice steady, flat, as if he’s reading off a tactical directive. “I will withdraw the petition. I will accept execution. If the case closes cleanly, Vol’s people will stop looking at you. They will stop seeing you as a threat. You and the child?—”
“Stop,” I snap.
He doesn’t. “—you will have a chance to live without becoming collateral in a diplomatic firestorm.”
My hands curl into fists on the console edge. The cold metal bites into my palms and keeps me from screaming.
“You’re doing it again,” I say, voice shaking with fury. “You’re doing that martyr thing like it’s a personality trait.”
“It’s not martyrdom,” he replies tightly. “It’s strategy.”
“It’s cowardice dressed up as virtue,” I spit, and the word is harsh, unfair, and absolutely true in the moment because myanger needs something to bite. “It’s you trading yourself again to protect a system that murdered civilians.”
Rhyx’s jaw tightens. “Selene?—”
“No,” I cut in, louder now, and the officers at the door shift like they might intervene, but they don’t. “No. You do not get to decide that for me. You do not get to decide that for the kid in my body. You do not get to decide that for forty-seven thousand dead.”
Rhyx’s eyes narrow. “You think I want this.”
“I think you want control,” I say, and my voice is colder now, the anger sharpening into something clean. “You want to make a choice that you can justify, so you don’t have to sit with the possibility that youcouldn’tcontrol what happened and youcan’tcontrol what’s happening now. So you offer yourself up like a neat sacrifice, and everyone gets to call you honorable while the people who actually moved the corridor keep their hands clean.”
His binders hum louder as his hands flex against them.
“You are pregnant,” he says, and the words sound like he’s trying to anchor himself. “You are a civilian tribunal staffer. You have no institutional protection. Vol has power. The Senate has power. If they decide to make you an example?—”
“Then let them try,” I say fiercely.
Rhyx stares at me as if I’ve spoken a language he half recognizes.
“You don’t understand,” he says, voice low, urgent. “They will not come at you like they come at me. They will not make you a clean villain. They will make you disappear. They will ruin you quietly.”
I lean forward across the console, close enough that I can smell him beneath the sterility—something earthy, like heat stored in stone and a faint mineral tang. My voice drops to a controlled hiss.
“I grew up in quiet ruin,” I say. “I am not scared of it.”
His gaze flickers down, then back up, and something in his expression fractures—pain, admiration, fear, all layered.
“You shouldn’t have to be this brave,” he murmurs.
“I’m not brave,” I snap. “I’m furious. There’s a difference.”
Rhyx’s shoulders rise slightly on an inhale, then settle, and his voice turns softer, not pitying, but raw. “I can’t… I can’t watch another innocent life become collateral.”
I feel my throat tighten.
“Innocent,” I repeat, and my hand lifts unconsciously to my abdomen, a protective gesture so instinctive it scares me. “You think this kid is innocent of the world it’s entering.”
Rhyx’s eyes follow the motion, and for a heartbeat the chamber feels too intimate for the walls around it, too charged with grief and defiance and something else I’ve been refusing to name because naming makes it real.
“I’m not asking you to protect me,” I say, quieter now, because my anger has burned down to embers and embers still sting. “I’m telling you to stop trying to protect me by dying. That is not protection. That is you repeating the same move until everyone applauds and the truth stays buried.”
