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My stomach flips, not because I understand, but because I can feel myself getting close enough to the answer for it to start turning ugly.

“They want witnesses,” Lucas says. “Pressure. Bodies around the altar. Enough fear in one place to make a reaction look like proof.”

“A sermon.” The word leaves me slowly, bitter with understanding.

Lucas doesn’t blink. “Yes.”

Of course.

The Iron Gospel doesn’t just hurt people. They stage the hurt until everyone watching understands what shape obedience is supposed to take. They don’t believe pain matters unless it can be interpreted, recorded, sanctified, turned into something useful for the next person they want on their knees.

I breathe in through my nose and make my hands unclench.

“They want me to come angry.”

Malek’s voice is low. “They’re counting on it.”

“They want me desperate.”

The fire shifts across Malek’s face, catching in his silver eye until it reflects back sharp and animal-bright, the way predators look when they’ve already heard something moving in the dark.

“No,” he says, voice low. “Hopeless.”

The correction settles cold in my stomach because he’s right.

Desperate still has teeth. Desperate still runs, still fights, still believes there is something left to reach for.

Hopeless is easier to lead.

I think of the photo in my pocket. The girl they followed. Measured. Studied. Me, caught in a moment I didn’t know anyone had stolen, turned into evidence before I ever knew there was a trial. I think of Cass, dragged into the mouth of that place because the Gospel understood love well enough to weaponize it, but not enough to fear what it becomes when it stops begging.

Something inside me goes very still.

“They didn’t take that photo to threaten me.” My fingers find the folded edge of it through my pocket, and suddenly the violation feels colder than fear. “They took it to learn where I break.”

Malek’s attention sharpens.

Lucas gives nothing away, but one of the Black Harvest women looks at me then, really looks, and I know I’ve said something that matters.

“They’re done circling.” Lucas’s voice turns grim. “They’re moving. Veiled Choir included.”

The words scare me, but not in the way they’re supposed to. They don’t make me smaller; they make everything inside me go quiet enough to aim.

“What happens if I don’t go?” The question leaves me carefully, because some part of me already knows better than to ask it out loud.

The group goes quiet in a different way, and I hate them for answering before anyone opens their mouth.

Malek gives me the rest anyway. “Cass becomes the lesson.”

The world narrows until all I can hear is the last coal dying at my feet and the sound of my own breath staying too even for what he just said. Cass would not just die to them; she would be arranged, interpreted, made useful to men who think pain is still a language God understands. They would turn my sister into scripture, into warning, into proof of what happens when love makes a woman easy to aim, and something in me goes cold enough to steady.

Fuck that.

Not another one of my sisters.

Lucas looks toward the dark. “They’ll expect you to run straight for her.”

“Good,” I say, because if they expect grief to make me careless, then they’ve already misunderstood what grief has made me.”