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Skin to skin.

His palm settles against my stomach, warm and steady, fingers spread like he’s bracing me from the inside. The contact steals a fraction of my breath, my muscles locking not in fear of him but in obedience to the moment, to the dark pressing close enough that even breathing feels like noise. I can feel the cadence of my pulse under his hand; I can feel him register it, count it, keep it even.

One of them passes so close the cold slides along my forearm like a blade drawn just shy of skin, the stink of rot and old blood punching up the back of my throat until my eyes water and my tongue tastes copper. Every nerve screams don’t breathe, don’t move as it stops beside me.

Its eyes lift.

Black, flooded through with a dull copper sheen that catches the low light the same way Malek’s does—wrong and familiar all at once. The head tilts, slow and deliberate, that same color fixing past me with a focus that isn’t hunger and isn’t curiosity.

It’s listening, but not to me.

Not to my breathing.

Not to my heartbeat.

To him.

Under my shirt, Malek’s hand firms—just a fraction—an anchor without pressure, a silent insistence to hold. His thumb shifts minutely below my ribs, not a command, not comfort, just acknowledgment that he’s there and that he’s reading whatever this thing is reading through him.

Its posture changes. Not submission. Not reverence. Acknowledgment—the way a trained animal registers a command it doesn’t need repeated. My stomach drops hard, the realization hitting low and heavy.

Then they’re moving again, bodies threading through the trees like water finding the easiest path around stone, branches and brush parting without resistance, the forest itself rearranging to accommodate them. They don’t circle. They don’t test us. They don’t look back.

They route around us.

Around him.

Toward something already decided.

When the last shape disappears downslope, the woods don’t relax. The silence stays tight, coiled, like it’s waiting to see what we do next.

Only then does Malek move.

His hand slides away from my skin, slow and deliberate, withdrawing inch by inch until the cold rushes in where his warmth had been. The absence lands sharper than the touch, my breath catching despite myself. He steps back half a pace, giving me space with the same precision he took it.

I don’t move right away. I’m suddenly aware of how hard my jaw is clenched, of the way my shoulders have locked like I’m still bracing for impact that never came.

Slowly, I lower the hatchet. Step forward. Put space between us again—not retreating, just reclaiming the air around my body.

“They didn’t look at you like prey,” I say, the words leaving me too carefully. “They looked at you like something that used to give orders.”

“Yes,” Malek answers, and there’s no hesitation in it. No apology.

That should make me feel better.

It doesn’t.

Because the Hollowborn didn’t just move around him. They moved around me too. Not with recognition, not exactly, but with that awful, almost-thinking hesitation, like they’d come upon something in the dark they hadn’t been taught how to name yet.

I look toward the trees, where their silence still feels pressed between the trunks.

“And me?” My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. “They didn’t know whether to pass me or answer me.”

Malek goes still behind me.

Not enough for anyone else to notice.

Enough for me.