POV: Jasmine
"Everything in my life is connected to you saving me." Leo's voice is quiet now, the rage burned out, leaving something worse in its place—calm certainty. "Maybe it's time I figure out who the hell I am without that."
The words slice through me with surgical precision. I've spent fourteen years building my identity around protecting him, and he's just told me that protection was a cage.
"Leo, please." I step toward him, my voice cracking. "Think about what you're saying. You have a job in the city, an apartment, a whole life waiting for you. We built that together. You can't just throw it away because you're angry with me."
"I'm not angry." His jaw sets with that stubborn determination I recognize from childhood—the look he'd get when he decided something and no force on earth could move him. "I'm done, Jas. Done being the problem you have to solve. Done being the reason you sacrifice everything."
"You were never a problem—"
"Wasn't I?" He laughs, but there's no humor in it. "Thirty-seven thousand dollars. That's what my fuck-up cost you. And you paid it with your body because I was too weak to handle my own shit."
"I chose to do that. You didn't make me—"
"But you did it for me." His eyes bore into mine. "And now every time you look at me, you see what you had to become to save me. I can't live with that anymore. I won't."
The accusation lands because it touches my deepest fear—that choosing the brothers means rejecting him. That my love for them somehow diminishes what I feel for my own blood.
"So I'm not good enough to be your family anymore?" The question tears out of me before I can stop it. "Is that what you're saying?"
Leo's expression cracks for just a moment, pain bleeding through. "That's not—Jesus, Jas. You're twisting my words."
"Then explain it to me." I'm crying now, tears streaming down my face. "Because from where I'm standing, it sounds like you're punishing me for finally wanting something for myself."
Liam steps forward carefully, his hand finding the small of my back. "Leo, your job and apartment will be there when you want to come back. We'll make sure of it. However long you need."
"I don't want them to be there." Leo's voice goes cold, directed at Liam with barely concealed hostility. Then it softens as his gaze returns to me. "Look, I'm not mad at you guys. This isn't about you. Any of you."
"Then what is it about?" Finn asks quietly from behind us, his usual playfulness completely absent.
"It's about me needing to figure out my own life without my sister fixing everything." Leo runs a hand through his hair, and for a moment he looks so young, so lost. "I don't know who I am outside of being the guy Jasmine has to save. The screwup. The burden. I need to find out if there's something else."
"You were never a burden," I whisper.
"Maybe not to you." He shakes his head slowly. "But I was to myself. And I can't keep being that person."
The silence stretches between us, filled with everything we can't say. Fourteen years of shared trauma, of holding each other together through foster homes and absent parents and a world that never wanted us. All of it reduced to this moment in a barn, with hay dust floating in the afternoon light and my brother choosing to walk away.
"I'm not going to watch you leave," Leo says finally. "I can't. So just... go. Please."
"Leo—"
"Go, Jas." His voice breaks on my name. "Before I change my mind and hate myself for it."
I want to argue. Want to grab him and shake him until he understands that he's not a burden, that he never was. But Asher's hand closes around my elbow, firm and grounding, and I know he's right. Pushing Leo now will only drive him further away.
Martha appears at the barn door minutes later, her weathered face soft with sympathy. "He asked me to tell you it's time."
"Will you—" I can barely form the words. "Will you take care of him?"
"Like he was my own." She pulls me into a hug that smells like lavender and fresh bread, the kind of maternal comfort I never got from my own mother. "He's going to be okay, sweetheart. Sometimes people need to break apart before they can put themselves back together right."
The drive back to the city passes in a blur of fields and silence. Asher drives because he needs control, his knuckles white on the steering wheel, jaw clenched tight. Finn sits in the passenger seat, uncharacteristically quiet, staring out the window at nothing. And Liam holds me in the backseat, his arms wrapped around me as I watch the farm shrink to a speck in the rearview mirror and then disappear entirely.
"We'll take care of him," Liam murmurs against my hair. "Even if he doesn't want us to. Martha will send updates. When he's ready, if he wants to come back, everything will be waiting."
"And if he doesn't want to come back?" My voice sounds hollow, even to my own ears.
"Then we make sure he's okay anyway." His grip tightens. "This is a promise, Jasmine. We fight for you. And for him."
The city appears on the horizon as the sun begins to set, painting the skyline in shades of orange and gold. I watch the familiar buildings rise up to meet us, and for the first time in my life, they don't feel like home. Home was where Leo was. Home was a cramped apartment with thin walls and a brother who needed me.
And Leo had chosen elsewhere.
"Where to?" Asher's voice breaks through my thoughts as we approach the city limits, gruff but gentle. "Your apartment or ours?"
I look at Liam still holding my hand. At Finn turned around in his seat, watching me with desperate hope in his eyes. At Asher's reflection in the rearview mirror, steel-gray eyes waiting for my answer.
Three men who promised to fight for me. One brother who'd decided to find himself without me.
"Yours," I whisper, making the choice again even as it tears me apart.
Asher's response is immediate, his voice carrying a weight that settles something in my chest. "It's also yours now."