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“I was so scared,” I whisper.

“I know.”

And this time I let him say it. Because he does know. Maybe not exactly what the fear felt like in my body, but enough. Enough to have stayed in that parking lot for hours. Enough to have come the second he was needed. Enough to look like this now.

I don’t mean to say it then. It just comes.

“I love you too.”

He goes perfectly still.

Not in the cold way. In the way a person does when something has gone straight through him.

My own voice is shaking, but I keep going because if I stop now I’ll lose the nerve. “I love you too,” I say again. “I was angry and confused and I still am, but I do.”

He bows his head once, and when he looks back at me his face is open in a way I have never seen before. No distance. No discipline. No polished control left to hide behind.

“Maggie.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

That answer should annoy me.

It doesn’t.

He leans forward until his forehead rests against mine, and for a second we just breathe the same air in the same dim room while the rest of the hospital carries on outside.

Then he says, very quietly, “Nothing changes.”

I pull back enough to see his face. “What?”

His eyes close for a moment before he opens them again. “Nothing changes.”

“Dalton—”

“No.” His voice breaks on the word, then steadies by force. “I love you. God knows I love you. But none of this changes.”

The room goes silent.

Not because I don’t understand him. Because I do.

Alester upstairs. The agreement. The threats I still only partly understand. The city he says he’s moving to. The future he’s already trying to amputate before it can take more from either of us.

I stare at him. “You say that after I just told you⁠—”

“I know what you told me.”

“Then don’t say it like that.”

He looks wrecked now. Stripped down. Like every useful part of him is being asked to function after something essential has already torn.

“I wish I had something better to give you,” he says. “I don’t.”

That hurts because it sounds exactly like him. Because he’s not lying, and because there are moments when honesty feels crueler than anything else.

I shake my head once. “I hate when you do that.”