Page 58 of 13 Nights

She absorbs this and turns back to the evidence without flinching. "Break its chains," she repeats. "The curse. The chains are the curse."

"That's my reading."

"And 'still owe the Gate.' A debt. Separate from the curse. Not erased by breaking it."

"Also my reading."

"Then the Gate's claim isn't the beloved. It's the debt. The toll extracted from the soul who refused." Her hand flattens on the table, pressing the annotated pages against the wood. "The warning isn't about what happens to me. It's about what happens to you."

"We don't know that."

"We have converging evidence from three independent sources across two centuries, plus your own memory of the refusal. The grammar supports it. The Hadley record supports it. Eliza's survival supports it. Your memory of the impression at the moment of death supports it." Her voice is steady, each sentence building on the one before. "I'm not guessing. I'm reading the evidence."

"The evidence is incomplete."

"Evidence is always incomplete. You make decisions on the best available data, and the best available data says the Gate wants something from you. Not from me."

I cross the kitchen. She doesn't step back.

I stop close enough that the warmth of her body reaches me through the linen of my shirt, and the proximity hums through nerves I've spent lifetimes numbing.

"I gave you control when I chose to give it," she says. "I never gave you my choices."

"I'm not asking for your choices. I'm making mine."

"Your choice involves walking into a boundary that may not even work the way you remember, on the theory that the Void will take a manifestation it couldn't hold yesterday, so that a Gate you don't understand can't collect a toll you've only just learned exists." She pauses. "Does that sound like a plan? Or does it sound like a man who'd rather be in agony than admit he doesn't have all the answers?"

"I can't watch you die," I say. The words come out stripped of every rhetorical tool I own, bare and graceless and true. "I have endured the cannon and the Void and every October since. I cannot endure your death."

"Then trust the evidence." Her hand finds the center of my sternum, over the pulse she discovered on Night Eleven. The pressure of her palm is warm and specific and intentional. "Trust me."

I cannot command her to survive by my rules. Knowing that does not make me willing to watch her die. She will not promise to remain behind. I will not promise to let her follow.

Neither of us yields.

I take her wrist. Her pulse kicks against my fingers, and the involuntary acceleration tells me everything her composure won't.

We're standing in a kitchen that smells like bread and coffee with an argument neither of us can win still hanging in the air between us, and the only certainty left is that we have until dawn.

"Come with me," I say, and I pull her toward the bedroom because if this is the last night I have hands and a heartbeat and a woman who sees me, I will spend it on my terms.

The bedroom is still dark, the curtains drawn against the early gray. She sits on the edge of the mattress and looks up at me with an expression that contains no uncertainty and no illusion.

"This might be the last time," she says.

"Don't."

"It might be. If your plan succeeds."

"My plan is designed to keep you alive."

"Your plan keeps a version of me alive that is forced to live without you. That isn't the same thing." Her chin lifts. "I'm not asking you to choose differently. I'm asking you to honor the fact that I get a choice too."

Here, in this room, the authority is mine because she places it in my hands. Beyond this bed, her choices remain her own.

I tell her to stand. She rises without hesitation. I turn her by the shoulders and pull the shirt over her head from behind, my mouth against the back of her neck, my hands following the fabric down her arms until it drops.

Her skin is pale in the dim light, and the marks I left on her hip last night have already begun to fade.