Page 45 of Fated in A Time of War

I should stop there. Should let the quiet hold us. But the question gnawing at me is louder than my sense of caution.

“What happens,” I ask softly, my voice barely louder than the rustle of the ruined train around us, “when they find us?”

His head tilts slightly. His eyes narrow, searching me like he’s trying to peel away the skin of my words and see the fear beneath. I don’t look away. I want him to answer.

He doesn’t—not right away. He breathes in slow. Out slower. The silence stretches long enough that my chest tightens, wondering if I’ve gone too far. Wondering if I’ve reminded him who I am. What I am.

Then his voice cuts through. Steady. Hard-edged, but not cold.

“I kill them before they kill you.”

The words land like a blade driven into stone. Not boast. Not bravado. Not the kind of hollow promises I’ve heard from commanders or priests, empty assurances meant to soothe.

This is fact.

My throat tightens so hard it hurts. I try to swallow, but it’s like something inside me locks in place.

No one has ever promised me that before.

For a long breath, I can’t speak. Can’t do anything but stare at him, the weight of his vow settling into me like heat into bone.

“You mean that,” I whisper finally.

His eyes snap to mine, gold catching in the faint starlight through the hole in the ceiling. He doesn’t blink. Doesn’t look away.

“I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

There’s no softness in the way he says it. No romance. No flowery words. Just the truth, stripped bare.

Something in me trembles, but not with fear. With something far more dangerous.

I look down at my hands, still stained with his blood, still smelling faintly of antiseptic and rust. My chest feels too tight for the small space of this wreck. Too raw. Too alive.

“You don’t have to,” I murmur, though even as I say it I know it’s a lie.

His jaw clenches. He leans forward, elbows braced on his knees, eyes locked on me with that same unshakable intensity that’s both shield and weapon.

“I do.”

Two words. Nothing more.

But in them, there’s a promise I never asked for. One I’ll never be able to forget.

The silence after stretches heavy, thick with everything unsaid. I press my palms to my knees, trying to steady thetremor running through me, trying to remind myself who he is. What he is.

The enemy.

But the echo of his vow doesn’t feel like the enemy. It feels like something else. Something I don’t have a name for yet.

I meet his gaze again, and I’m not afraid of what I see in him.

I’m afraid of what I feel in me.

The wrecked mag-train creaks with every breath of wind, like the steel ribs of some dying beast shifting in its last dreams. The air inside is stale, metallic, thick with the ghost of long-burnt fuel. It should feel suffocating. A prison within a prison. But with him here—silent, looming, too close and not close enough—it feels different. Safer.

I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s exhaustion, maybe it’s the heat from his body bleeding into mine after days of cold, or maybe it’s that vow still echoing in my chest, the certainty in his voice replaying like a drumbeat I can’t unhear.

Whatever it is, I move before I can stop myself.