Her fingers curled slightly.
A flicker of something moved through her expression, brief, small, present for less than a full second before it resolved into something else entirely.
"This child," she said quietly, her voice finding a steadiness as she spoke that had not been there at the beginning of the sentence, "will only hold me back."
There was no audible distress in the words. No visible fracture in the composure she was maintaining. Only the quiet, deliberate arrival of a conclusion that had been assembling itself from everything she had observed and measured and decided carried weight.
War did not accommodate softness. It consumed it.
Power did not reward attachment. It registered it as vulnerability and moved accordingly.
And genuine survival, the kind she was now beginning to understand she actually wanted, rather than the passive continuation she had previously accepted as sufficient, required the willingness to release what could not come with her.
