I try to answer, but nothing comes. My throat feels scraped clean. My bones feel hollow, like the trial scooped something out of me and left the absence behind.
When my voice finally crawls its way free, it’s thin and frayed at the edges.
“I had to face your fears,” I manage, swallowing against the burn. “And then mine.”
River’s breath stumbles, catching hard in his chest. The truth hits him like a blow he wasn’t braced for.
Ryder goes utterly still beside me, his jaw tightening, a muscle ticking in his cheek as if he already knows what fear of his I saw.
Nala looks between the three of us, her expression shifting, understanding arriving with slow, painful clarity.
I turn toward the clearing where the cottage once stood. There’s nothing left now—no walls, no door, no glow—just drifting dust carried away by the Hollow’s restless wind. It feels almost as if the house was never real at all, only a mouth that opened to devour our secrets and spit us back out changed.
The Hollow didn’t want to kill me.
It wanted to expose us.
Exposeeverything.
The truth now stretches between us like a live wire—dangerous to touch but impossible to ignore. And as the silence settles around us, heavy and electric, I know with a certainty that sinks straight into my bones that nothing about us—
not friendship, not loyalty, not love—will ever be the same.
Chapter Twenty-One
The wind threads through the trees, carrying the last flecks of dust from the vanished cottage. No one speaks. No one even moves. It’s as if all of us are waiting for someone else to breathe first, because the moment we do, something fragile might break.
Ryder finally draws in a slow, uneven breath and helps me to my feet, his hand hovering near my waist like he’s ready to catch me if I so much as sway. River rises as well, shoulders stiff, eyes still flicking to Ryder and then away, a subtle jealousy behind his eyes. Nala brushes dirt off my clothes with fussing hands that can’t quite hide how shaken she still is.
“You’re hurt.” Ryder traces my cheek with his thumb, and I flinch slightly beneath his touch.
“I’m fine,” I say, wiping the blood from my lip with the back of my hand. “We should keep moving, the Hollow isn’t just going to stop cos we need a minute.” Ryder’s brows knit tighter in concern.
“What did you see in there?” His voice is low, quiet, almost ashamed, and I know he already knows.
I tense, the memory of his fear flickering in front of me: his knees in the dirt, blood on his hands, my lifeless eyes staring back at him.
My silence stretches too long.
River shifts beside me, “Maybe don’t make her relive it all right away.”
Ryder shoots him a look sharp enough to cut, but he doesn’t snap back. He waits, tension coiled through his shoulders.
“I saw what you’re afraid of,” I finally say. “That’s all.”
River is looking at me with more than concern—something deeper, something raw—and I have to drag my eyes away before they can meet his. It’s a look I’ve seen a hundred times before, always pretending I hadn’t, always telling myself I was imagining it.
But now… now that I’ve seen his fear made flesh, now that I know the truth he never meant for me to witness, I can’t look at him without something in my chest sinking, heavy and aching.
I swallow hard, forcing words past the knot in my throat.
“Can we please just get out of this place?”
My voice cracks on the last word, a bittersweet statement—I want so badly to get out of this place and leave the fears behind, but I know that somewhere buried in the fog, another trial is waiting.
Watching.
Patient.
