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Malek crosses his arms over his wide chest, and I know that look by now—restraint dressed up as patience.

I look back at him, steady enough to make him listen. “Let them expect it.”

The man standing closest studies me. “Expectation is not the same as advantage.”

“No,” I agree. “But expectation is a blind spot when the woman you’re studying stops being predictable.”

Something moves through the Black Harvest. Not approval exactly. Recognition. Like they’re beginning to understand I am not asking to be carried into this. I am asking where to put my feet.

Malek doesn’t step in front of me. He doesn’t correct me. He doesn’t turn my choice into his permission.

He only watches.

And for once, watching doesn’t feel like a cage. It feels like he is learning what it costs not to build one.

Lucas exhales slowly. “Then we need to talk roads.”

“No.” My voice stays quiet, but it stops the conversation where it stands.

His brows pull together.

“Not until we stop pretending this is only about where I go.”

I look past him, toward the dark beyond the trees, toward the place where my sister waits inside a story someone else thinks they get to finish. My anger is there, but it is not wild anymore. It has edges now. Direction. A place to go.

“They planned for the girl they thought was kept in a gilded cage.” The words leave me quietly, but something in them has teeth. “Soft. Contained. Easy to aim.”

For one breath, the words almost turn on me.

Because maybe some part of me was caged. Maybe some part of me survived because Cass and Scarlett kept the worst of the world outside the fence and let me believe that meant safety instead of sacrifice. Maybe the Gospel looked at that photo and saw something true enough to hurt.

Then Malek shifts beside me, not in front of me and not close enough to touch, but near enough that the heat of him moves through the thin places in my doubt before it can root. He doesn’t say my name. He doesn’t correct the fear. He doesn’t make my spine for me. He only stands beside me like he already knows I have one.

I breathe once, and this time the air makes it all the way down.

Then I look toward the dark beyond the trees, toward the place where they planned for a frightened girl behind fences and forgot the world has been teaching me what to become.

“That’s not who’s walking in there.”

XXXV

No Clean Roads

There are no good paths left. I don’t have to think it through to know that—I can feel it in my gut, in the way the night presses down like it’s waiting for a body to hit the ground. Even the dirt under my boots feels slanted now, like the world has already chosen where this falls and I’m just late to the understanding.

The Black Harvest doesn’t say it out loud. They don’t argue. They don’t offer comfort dressed up as strategy. The math is already scratched into the space between us, ugly and permanent; the kind you only see once you’ve crossed the point where turning back stops being an option.

If we extract Cass, we tear the quiet open. We move fast enough to leave pieces behind. The Iron Gospel won’t waste rot on that—they’ll send people. Trained ones. The kind who know how to follow without being seen, how to bleed without noise, how to turn pursuit into ritual. They’ll track us through tree lines and towns and memories. Through every place I ever thought the fences mattered. And they won’t just come for us. They’ll come for whoever helped. Whoever hesitated. Whoever was too close when we passed through. Speed will buy Cass minutes. It will cost other people their lives.

If we strike the Iron Gospel directly, Cass dies. Not accidentally. Not as collateral. Deliberately. They’ll kill her because it completes the story. Because obedience wrapped in sacrifice is the spine of their faith. They’ll carve meaning into her body and call it holy, and they’ll make sure the world understands what happens when someone like me refuses to kneel. Her death won’t be hidden. It’ll be sung.

If we wait—if we stay here and pretend patience is the same thing as control—then something worse happens. Something quieter. The kind of damage that doesn’t look like damage until it’s already finished. Cass won’t just be leverage anymore. She’ll become a tool. A voice. A lesson delivered slowly enough that it seeps in and stays. By the time we move, there won’t be anything left to extract.

Every option ends in blood. The only difference is whose blood we decide we can carry.

That’s when Malek goes quiet, and something in me tightens because I know that quiet now.

It isn’t distance. It isn’t surrender. It’s the awful, careful silence of a man turning every possible loss over in his hands until he finds the one he can make belong to him.