“You’re not sorry. You’re just scared I’ll see you for what you are.”

Her voice shakes as much as her hands, but the words land like iron.

I can’t speak.

Gods, I wish I could. I wish I could rewind three days—hell, three weeks—back to before I thought lying would somehow protect her. Before I convinced myself that if she didn’t know about the enforcer raids, she wouldn’t try to stop them. Before I let silence become safety.

But now, she’s here in my room—my room—surrounded by marble and brass and generational wealth while she’s falling apart because her friends are gone. Arrested. Beaten. Maybe worse.

Because I said nothing.

⸻

Back up. Let me start over.

My name’s Cassian Talowyn. Third son of House Talowyn. A family that designs half the tech lining Piltover’s golden streets and lives off the profits of Zaun’s suffering.

I met Renn Virell on a dare. My friends and I were drinking at Highcross and someone joked, “Bet you won’t survive a week in Zaun.” So I went. Like an idiot.

She caught me trying to navigate the sump alone. Eyes like heat, hair messy and tied back with wire. I was so obviously lost, so obviously Piltover in my posture and breath and ignorance. She called me “topside trash” the first time she spoke to me.

I should’ve left it there. But she grinned after she said it.

That grin ruined me.

She was brilliance wrapped in grime. She made spark-bombs out of spare screws and laughed at my clean fingernails. I started going back. Then sneaking back. Then staying. We started arguing about tech, then about people, then about us. And somewhere in all of that—I fell.

Not some storybook fall. I didn’t even realize it until the world started turning around her. Until she mattered more than Piltover’s polished lies.

But now?

Now she’s crying. And I’ve never seen her cry before.

⸻

She’s pacing across my floor like it burns her, tear tracks cutting through soot on her cheeks.

“They came at night,” she chokes out. “Marlo, Tekk, that little girl from the vent crew—gone. You knew, Cassian.”

She doesn’t shout it. That’s the worst part.

She just says it. Plain. True.

And I can’t deny it.

I try to speak. “Renn—”

“No.” Her voice fractures. “Don’t you dare say you did it for me.”

“I had to—if you tried to stop it, you’d be—”

“What?” She rounds on me, eyes red and shining. “Dead? Like they might be? And you think I’d rather be safe here in your penthouse while they vanish?”

Gods.

Her shoulders are shaking. I take a step forward.

She backs away.

“You don’t care about Zaun,” she says. Not loud. Not soft. Just… final. “You care about me. I’m your little exception. The shiny thing you found down below.”

“That’s not true.” My voice sounds too thin.

“Isn’t it?”

She wipes at her face and it breaks me more than any scream.

“If I were just another dirty engineer crawling in the dark—you wouldn’t have looked twice. But I was interesting. I was a story.”

I want to tell her she’s wrong. That she’s wrong, godsdammit. That she’s everything. That she changed everything. But my mouth won’t open because deep down, I don’t know if I saw her or what she represented.

I can’t move.

And I hate myself for it.