“Don’t make this harder than it already is,” Ambessa says, yanking her arm free and folding it across her chest. Her voice is firm, but you can hear the cracks if you listen close enough. She looks away, like even being here is costing her too much. You clinging to her isn’t helping. If anything, it’s making it harder for her to do what she knows she has to.

“This isn’t about me wanting to hurt you,” she says, her tone clipped, trying to sound detached. “It’s about keeping you alive. People like me? We don’t get to have vulnerabilities, and that’s all you are to anyone who’d come after me. A target.”

She’s trying to shut you out, to build up the walls you’d spent so long breaking down. It feels rehearsed, like she’s been preparing herself for this moment. But something’s off. Her usual confidence isn’t there.

“You’ll be better off without me,” she adds, but her eyes don’t meet yours, and that says everything. Ambessa values eye contact. She always has. And her refusal to look at you now? It’s a tell. A crack in her armor.

“This… this was never going to work,”, her words are blunt and heavy. “Not with the path I have to walk. You don’t fit into my story, and no version of it ends with us getting some fairytale. No version of it ends with you alive.”

She exhales, shaking her head as if she’s trying to clear the doubt creeping in. “My father always told me I shouldn’t let anyone in. Should’ve listened,” she mutters, almost like she’s talking to herself now. There’s regret there, but she’s trying not to let it show. Not enough for you to stop her.