“You’re not listening?—”
“I heard you.” My hand moves before conscious thought—reaching toward her face, stopping short of contact, hovering in the space between us. “Separation doesn’t work. We tried that already. The attacks intensify when you’re not beside me.”
She doesn’t point out that we never actually tried separation. We both know the closest we came was the mountain pass, when she was nearly crushed, and I discovered priorities I didn’t know I had.
“What do you suggest, then?”
The question hangs in the air. She’s offering me the choice. The decision. Letting me define the terms of whatever this is becoming.
I should defer to strategic logic. Propose multiple scenarios, calculate probabilities, approach this like the problem it objectively is.
Instead, I say: “Stay where I can reach you.”
Not a request.Not a suggestion. Not open for negotiation.
The words emerge as a rule—the first rule of a world I’m building in my head where she exists and I protect her. Where her survival is the axis around which everything else becomes negotiable.
She doesn’t argue.
She doesn’t negotiate.
She simply... nods.
The acknowledgment strikes a chord I don’t have words for. A lock sliding into place. A key turning in a mechanism I didn’t know existed. The final piece of a pattern that’s been forming since the moment her magic first intruded on my territory.
“Stay where I can reach you,” I repeat. Softer this time, but no less absolute. “That’s the rule. The only rule that matters.”
Her eyes search my face. Looking for what, I don’t know. Vulnerability, perhaps. Weakness. Evidence that I have a heart that beats for reasons other than pumping blood.
Whatever she finds, it satisfies her.
“Close enough to reach.” She accepts the terms without making them feel like submission. “Not a liability. A partner.”
I don’t correct her word choice. ‘Partner’ is acceptable. ‘Partner’ is workable. ‘Partner’ doesn’t imply the things I’m not ready to imply.
“Move when I move. Stop when I stop. If a threat engages me, you stay behind my guard until I neutralize it or tell you otherwise.” The instructions flow automatically—rules I’m building in real-time. “Your magic is valuable. Your life is more valuable. Don’t spend one to preserve the other.”
“And if your life is in danger?”
“It won’t be.”
“Kaster—”
“My job is to kill things that threaten you.” I hold her gaze with absolute certainty. “Your job is to make sure those things stay dead. That’s how this works. That’s how we end this.”
She absorbs the allocation of roles without comment. Her expression remains neutral, processing, calculating.
Then: “You’re not as cold as you pretend to be.”
The observation lands like a strike. Precise. Targeted. Designed to slip past defenses I didn’t realize I’d lowered.
“I’m exactly as cold as I need to be.”
“You destroyed that creature long after it was dead. That’s not cold. That’s?—”
“Thorough.”
“Kaster.”
