He flinches.
I stand. The chair scrapes behind me, loud and ugly. I leave it that way. "I'm not holy. I'm not yours. I'm not a conduit you get to monitor until someone higher up decides I'm ready for a cage with better lighting."
"Aven, please."
"Cain is dangerous," I say. "Soren needs more than he admits. Ira thinks safety is something he can build with locks. I know that. They know that. The difference is they're trying to let me choose anyway."
Ezra stands too, panic cutting through the last of his polish. "You think that because they've already gotten inside your head."
"You sent dead things into my head."
"I was trying to reach you."
"You were trying to steer me."
"Because you were walking toward a cliff."
"No," I say. "I was walking away from a door you wanted locked."
He reaches across the table. His hand comes toward my wrist, and the old reflex almost answers. The part of me trainedby years of visions and apology almost lets him touch me because Ezra touching me used to mean calm down, breathe, let someone else decide what happens next.
I step back before his fingers land.
His hand hangs in the air between us.
That hurts too. I hate that it hurts. I hate that some part of me still remembers wanting his touch to be enough.
"When this starts coming apart, run," I say.
His brows pull together. "What?"
"Run, Ezra. Not because I'm threatening you. Because for one second I still remember wanting you to be better than this." My throat tightens, but I make myself keep going. "When the things the Church has bound start finding their way back to the people who tied the knots, don't be standing next to them."
"Aven—"
"No more check-ins. No more coffee. No more crosses. No more soft conversations where you say my name like you're the only person who knows how to keep me from becoming a monster."
His hand lowers.
The mask is gone now. What's left looks young and frightened and so painfully familiar I almost can't stand it. He's not the whole machine. He's not innocent either. He's a person who found a warm place inside the machinery and called it faith because looking at the gears would have cost him too much.
"I did love you," he says.
I nod once. "I know."
That's all I can give him.
I leave before he can ask for more.
The bell over the door rings when I step out, bright and cheerful and obscene. The city air hits me hard enough to make me stumble. I keep walking until I reach the alley, until the coffee shop's clean windows are behind me and the brick wall isclose enough to catch my shoulder. My knees start to go before I can tell them not to.
Cain is there before I hit the ground.
He wraps around me, full body, one arm across my back and the other at the base of my skull, pulling me into the shadow of the alley where no one has to watch me come apart. He doesn't ask what Ezra said. He doesn't ask whether I won. He only holds me against him while the coffee shop keeps pretending nothing happened on the other side of the glass.
For a few seconds, I can't breathe correctly. Everything comes in broken pieces: burnt coffee, cold brick, Cain's coat, the old metal scent of his blood magic, the horrible clean look on Ezra's face when he admitted enough to damn himself and not enough to understand why it mattered.
"I hate being right," I say into Cain's chest.
