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I got in the car because I wanted more time with you.

One more hour. One more drive. One more moment of being near you before I had to go back to keeping my distance, to building the walls, to making myself someone you'd stop looking at the way you looked at me that night with your hair blowing and your eyes bright and that small smile that has haunted me every day since.

That's the truth I have carried alone. That one small, human, selfish decision. I wanted more time.

And it cost four people everything.

I watched Devlin. I watched grief enter him and do what grief does to people who were already dangerous, compress it, weaponise it, turn it into something cold and precise and aimed. I knew then he would never stop pulling at threads. I knew he would find his way to you. I knew that whatever he became in the aftermath of losing his sister, you would be standing at the center of the target.

I couldn't let that happen.

So I tightened Fiona's leash around my own neck and I made myself useful and I kept my eyes on Masen and I stayed close enough to the wreckage to see what it was doing to everyone still standing in it. Including Cas.

Losing Kenna destroyed him in ways I couldn't fix and couldn't reach and could only watch from the outside as he closed himself off and found something in Devlin's world that felt more honest than the lies I was still feeding him. I lost Cas before I lost you. I watched him go and I understood why and I let him because what else could I do — drag him deeper into a deal that was already swallowing me whole?

I lost my best friend and the girl I loved in the same year.

I just didn't admit the second one out loud.

Every cruel thing I said to you was deliberate.

I need you to know that too. Not because it makes it better, it doesn't, and I know it doesn't, and I will go to my grave knowing exactly how each of those words landed because I watched your face every time I delivered them. I know what it looks like when Toren Kellar tries not to show that something hurt her. I know the way your jaw tightens and your eyes go very still for half a second before the fire comes back. I saw it every time.

I did it anyway. Because the fire was safer than the alternative. Because you angry at me meant you stayed alive. Because every wall I built between us was another layer of protection between you and the people who would use your feelings for me as ammunition the second they identified them.

I made myself impossible to love because loving me was going to get you killed.

I would do it again.

I would say every cold word, take every step back, wear that indifference like armour for another two years if it kept you breathing. I know that's not what you wanted from me. I know you deserved the truth, deserved someone who could stand beside you and say it plainly. But I have never once in my life been able to give you what you deserved. All I could give you was distance and the specific cruelty of someone who loves you enough to let you hate him.

There are things I need you to do.

Fiona Williams is not what she sold herself as. The deal I made, the immunity, the protection, everything I believed I was buying for us, I don't trust it. I've been watching her for two years and I have never once seen her give anything she didn't intend to collect on. The moment I become more dangerous to her than I am useful, that deal becomes worthless paper and she becomes a problem. I need you to know her name. I need you to understand that the threat doesn't end when your father goes down. It doesn't end when Devlin wins his war. There is a woman behind all of it who has been playing a longer game than any of them and she is the most dangerous person in both towns precisely because no one is looking at her.

Look at her, Tor.

And watch your back. The person closest is not always the safest. I've been learning that the hard way my entire adult life.

I think about you every day.

I think about the bonfire and the first time I really saw you, not Masen's little sister, not Senator Kellar's daughter, just you. The version of you that existed when no one was performing anything, when you thought no one was watching. I think about the way you laughed with Kenna, the specific unguarded sound of it, the way it made everything around feel less complicated. I think about the kiss and the way you looked at me afterward like you'd been waiting for it and were furious that I made you wait so long.

I think about who you could have been if none of this happened to you. And then I think about who you're becoming anyway, in spite of it, dragging yourself through fire and coming out the other side with your spine straight and your eyes open, and I think, she didn't need saving after all.

She never did.

You are not a girl who needed a man to keep her safe.

You are a lighthouse, Tor. You always were. You draw things toward you without trying, the lost, the dark, the ones who've forgotten what direction looks like. I know what I am. I know Xaden Devlin has been aimed at you since the beginning like something looking for something it doesn't have language for yet. I think about that. I think you are exactly the kind of light that gets through to the kind of dark he carries.

Make him see you. Not your last name. Not the crash. Not the ghost of everything your family took from his. Make him see you, the real version, the one that survived Walter House and came back to a war she had no reason to fight and fought it anyway because if anyone can reach him, it's you. And he's going to need to be reached. The man he is right now is not the man he was built to be. Grief did that. Your brother did that. Someone needs to show him there's something on the other side of all that rage.

I'm sorry it can't be me standing beside you when you do it.

I'm sorry for all of it. For every moment I chose the mission over you. For every truth I swallowed to keep the deal alive. For the crash and for Kenna and for all of it, all the wreckage, all the cost, all the years you spent paying for a night you had no hand in.

For not telling you while I still had the chance.