A Broken Inheritance

Chapter 84: Slow Compromises

He didn't know what to do with it.

Because for once, she wasn't drowning. She wasn't begging to be saved. She wasn't even asking him to stay.

She was just... telling him.

And somehow, that made her feel farther away than ever.

He looked down at their joined hands. Her wrist, narrow and pale, was cool beneath his thumb. The ring was still off. Her fingers bore no ornament now. No tether.

James stared at them for a moment longer—her hand in his, so still, so quiet.

And suddenly, the guilt hit him like a tidal pull beneath his ribs.

That train station.

The image of her, hair neat, dress pressed, standing beside Riddle like everything had been ironed flat inside her.

She'd looked fine.

He'd hated her for it.

And now—God—she wasn't fine at all.

She was just... resigned.

Not broken, but carved down. Stripped to the softest version of herself, the one that never asked, never begged, never resisted. The one who didn't even argue when the world turned ugly.

The kind of girl who would walk willingly back into the lion's den if it meant saving someone else.

The kind of girl who would stay there.

"I should go," James murmured, throat tight.

He stood slowly, more from instinct than decision, letting go of her hand with reluctant fingers.

She stood too, matching his pace.

"You don't have to," she said softly, voice a brush of fabric against stone. "If you don't want to."

That undid him.

Not the words. The way she said them.

So measured. So kind.

Like she was offering him a place in the prison she'd built around herself.

And maybe, in her mind, she thought it was a kindness.

He turned before he could think better of it and wrapped his arms around her.

Tightly.

Like something might snap if he let go.

Her chin tucked against his shoulder. Her arms moved up to hold him in return—carefully, as if they were remembering how to do it. The top of her head fit just beneath his jaw. Her hair smelled like mint and smoke.

"I'm really glad you're alright," James whispered into her hair. His voice cracked on the word really.

But that was when it hit him.

A slow, awful, creeping clarity.

She thought she was alright.

She'd built a rational scaffold around her choices. Layered logic over sacrifice like sandbags against a flood. Told herself that if she could name every cost, tally every casualty, it meant she had control.

She'd stopped resisting.

No, worse.

She'd accepted it.

This was her version of peace now—a daily equation of who to betray and who to spare. Which life to preserve and which to let go. Who to become in the meantime.