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Her footsteps echoed on the polished floor as she made her way down to the holding cells. It was cooler down here, the light more filtered deep beneath the ground where the sun could not reach, the walls gone opaque for privacy. Behind some of them, she could see shadowed forms: some of them moving, pacing, others simply sitting still, awaiting their fate.
The cell she sought was guarded by two Dora Milaje. The younger of the two, a girl whose name she could not recall, looked surprised to see her. The older, Abebi, a woman she had fought beside for ten years and more, did not.
Okoye came to a halt before them. “Leave us.”
“General?” asked the girl.
“You heard me.”
Abebi looked up at her with an expression both sad and knowing. “Are you sure that is a good idea?”
“Am I your commander or not?” Okoye snapped. “Leave.”
Abebi looked up at her for another moment, then sighed and thumped her fists against her chest in salute. “Yes, General.”
Okoye waited until they were both out of sight before pressing her palm to the wall. With a soft whisper of sound, the nanites cleared the clouded wall, then folded it back in on itself, revealing the cell and the prisoner it contained. Okoye did not allow any emotion to show on her face as she stepped inside. She was skilled at controlling her expressions.
W’Kabi had no such skill, and his smile did nothing to hide his fear as he looked up at her. “Are you here to kill me, my love?”
Okoye braced her feet, set the butt of her spear against the floor. He looked smaller like this than she had ever seen him, dressed plainly in a dashiki and soft cotton pants without his weapons or his blanket to shield him. But it was his expression, more than anything, that pierced her heart. He looked defeated. Worse, he looked afraid. Of her. He had always loved her superior skill, and more often than not their sparring matches would end with her straddling him, pinning him down so that she could steal kisses from his laughing mouth—
He had betrayed her, he had betrayed Wakanda, and now he looked afraid.
“You will be pardoned,” she said, and saw the words strike him like blows. “You and all the Border Tribe who fought for the usurper.”
“Was that T’Challa’s doing, or yours?” he asked. She did not answer, which seemed to be answer enough. W’Kabi let out a mirthless laugh and dropped his head, his shoulders slumping. “He is too soft to be king. You know that, don’t you?”
“He is my king,” Okoye said, making her voice flat and cold. “You will be stripped of your rank. You will leave the palace, and you will live out your days with your tribe. You will not interfere any further in the affairs of the throne.”
W’Kabi nodded without looking up. His hands were in his lap, palms open and empty. He looked at them for a long time before lifting his head to meet her eyes. “And what of us?”
“What of us?” Okoye asked. “What should I say? What would please you most to hear?”
“The truth,” W’Kabi said. “Do you have any love left for me at all?”
Okoye closed her eyes. She thought of the chambers they shared when they were both at the palace, which she had visited in the past three days only to change her clothes; of the bed that she could not bring herself to sleep in because it still smelled of him. Of his shields on the walls beside her woven hangings and their shared toiletries beneath the mirrors, the sunken bath where he had rubbed cocoa butter into her tired feet at the end of a long day and laughed at her stories. The detritus of a life together, lying in ruins.
She sighed, and set her spear against the wall, and crossed the room to kneel before him. He watched her as warily as a cornered animal as she reached up to cup his cheeks in both her hands, and kissed him softly on the lips.
“I will always love you,” she said quietly when they broke apart. “But I will never forgive you. You will not see me again after today.”
W’Kabi closed his eyes, cupped one hand over hers, his calluses rasping at her knuckles, and finally nodded. “I understand.”
“Good,” Okoye said. She pulled her hands away and stood. He did not try to stop her. He watched her with wet eyes, but he did not try to stop her, and he did not stand. He did not reach out to her. He simply stayed where he was, and watched as she picked up her spear, as she spun on her heel and stalked out of the cell with long, confident strides.
It was not until she had left the cellblock, not until she had secreted herself away in a little-used balcony that faced the hills in the west and locked the door behind her, that she allowed herself to cry.