You said, "need me then."

“I would choose you.” He said out loud, the first true words he’d spoken in days. He spoke them before he thought of them, and he’d realised it too late to pull them back. The silence stretched longer than he wished and all he could plea for was the floor to open and drop him to a certain death or to wake up in his bed and it all be a dream.

“As your general?” She asked carefully, offering a chance for him to take back control, take them back to the calm ocean they both knew well.

But he didn’t, all the easy replies he could have chosen he left unsaid.

‘No, as my queen.’

or

My favourite scene from Rule of Wolves but Nikolai is deaf.