Dane's POV:
He goes silent.
Not the silence of a man choosing his words carefully. The silence of a man who already knows what he's going to say and is simply deciding when to say it. His eyes move over my face the way a chess player reads a board—cataloguing, evaluating, patient in a way that costs him nothing because he has always had patience to spare, even now, even with whatever is eating him from the inside.
I let him look.
I'm not stuttering. I know exactly where I stand. I know the weight of what's just been dangled in front of me, and I know the answer the same way I know my own heartbeat, without having to think, without having to search for it. This isn't my war. It never was. This was always meant to be a transaction: I give them my body, my skill, my years, and when Stocciani is a corpse in the ground, I take back what's left of myself and I leave.
That was always the arrangement. At least in my head.
