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No one argues.

One of Black Harvest drops a pack to the ground. It hits with a dull, decisive weight that echoes through my chest. No one reaches for a weapon. No one sits. This isn’t a meeting.

It’s a reckoning.

Malek doesn’t move closer to me. He doesn’t put a hand on my back or step in front of me. He holds his position like an axis—solid, deliberate—trusting me to occupy my own space.

That choice matters more than protection ever could.

The man who steps forward doesn’t waste time on ceremony. His eyes meet mine directly.

“They already wrote you down.” His voice stays flat, but the words feel anything but. “That means they’ve stopped watching to understand and started watching to decide.”

The words don’t shock me.

They explain me.

“How?” I ask.

“Pattern,” he says. “Witnesses. Survivors who didn’t know they were testifying.”

Lucas adds, “Before the farm. Before the fences. Before you ever thought you were hidden.”

I let that settle, feel the slow, precise anger coil where panic should be.

“So, I wasn’t found.” The realization settles cold in my stomach. “I was tracked.”

“Yes.”

“If Cass is the handle,” I say, my voice staying flat because anything else will break something, “then where are they trying to pull me?”

Lucas looks at Malek before he answers, and I hate that I understand the difference between asking permission and warning someone where the knife is about to land.

“The Blood Altar,” he says.

The name changes the air before I understand why.

It moves through the Black Harvest in a slow, ugly ripple, tightening mouths, shifting weight, pulling eyes toward the trees as if the place itself might hear when it’s spoken. No one gasps. No one asks him to repeat it. That makes it worse. Fear is one thing when it surprises people. It is something else entirely when it arrives and everyone recognizes it.

I look at Malek.

He doesn’t look away, and that tells me enough.

“You knew that’s where they’d take her.”

His jaw flexes once. “I suspected.”

The word lands too softly for the damage it does. Suspected. Like suspicion isn’t just truth wearing a thinner coat. Like he hasn’t been standing beside me with pieces of the answer tucked behind his teeth, deciding which ones I could survive hearing.

Lucas shifts beside him, his gaze cutting between us like he knows how fast this could turn into something sharp. “They didn’t move her there for punishment.”

My hand curls at my side before I can stop it.

Cass’s voice crawls back through my memory, thin and frightened beneath all that static. My name in my sister’s mouth. My grief turned into a leash and thrown exactly where they knew I would reach for it.

“Then why?” I ask, though some part of me already knows. I can feel the answer taking shape under my ribs, ugly and patient.

“Because Marrow Ridge is where they make things public.”