Cole shook his head. "You can't earn something you don't want." "Can't you?" Kaya stepped closer. "You didn't want us following you, but here we are. You didn't want to care whether we lived or died, but you do."
"You've been fighting this for ten years, Cole. Aren't you tired?" "Tired of what?" "Of running from the only people who've stayed." The words hit harder than Cole expected.
He looked away, jaw tight, and tried to find an argument that would hold up. But the truth was sitting right there in the room with them, and no amount of denial would make it disappear. "This isn't how things work," he said quietly. "Not in my world." "Then maybe your world's been wrong," Lyra said.
"Or maybe yours has." "Maybe." Lyra pushed off the window frame and walked over to stand beside Kaya. "But we're here anyway, and we're not leaving. So you've got two choices."
"Accept what we're offering and build something real, or spend the rest of your life dragging us behind you like ghosts." Cole looked at each of them. Kaya, steady and certain. Lyra, sharp-edged and defiant. Sani, quiet and unmovable.
Three women who'd taken a single moment of reckless courage and turned it into a decade-long commitment he'd never asked for and couldn't escape. "I need air," he said. Kaya nodded. "Take it. But we need an answer by sunrise."
Cole left the room, descended the stairs, and stepped out into the night. The temperature had dropped, and the cold bit at his skin through his shirt. He walked to the edge of town again, found the same rock he'd sat on earlier, and dropped onto it with a heavy exhale. His mind was a mess. Thoughts collided and scattered like startled birds, refusing to settle into anything coherent.
He tried to picture what they were describing, marriage, partnership, some kind of shared life, and couldn't make the image hold. It was too foreign, too strange. But then he thought about the alternative. Riding alone again. Waking up to silence.
Working jobs with strangers who'd forget his name the moment he left. Growing old with nothing to show for it but scars and regrets. That image came easier, too easy. "Damn you all," he whispered to the empty desert. A sound behind him made Cole turn.
Sani was walking toward him, moving slowly like she was approaching a skittish animal. "Kaya said to give you space," she said. "But I thought you might want company." "I want answers." "I don't have those. Only questions."
Sani sat down beside him, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. For a while, neither of them spoke. Then Sani broke the silence. "Do you know why I came with Kaya and Lyra that day?" "When we ran from the hunters?"
"No. Because staying meant dying slowly. We'd been captives for months, starved, beaten, used. Every day we stayed, we lost more of ourselves." "So when Kaya found a way out, I followed."