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The silence stretches until it starts to hurt. Not the awkward kind—the kind that pulls your pulse into your ears and makes every breath feel like it’s being counted against you.

Malek still hasn’t looked at me.

He’s watching the land like it’s already moving pieces when the rest of us are still pretending we’re standing still. The slope. The trees. The blind pockets where sound dies and faith gets loud. His mind is somewhere I can’t reach unless I follow him there, and I don’t want to. I already know what waits at the end of that path.

I’ve seen that stillness before—on men right before they step into something they don’t expect to come back from. It isn’t mercy leaving him. It’s everything else being stripped away so only function remains.

The map doesn’t interest him. Neither does the Black Harvest. Neither does Cass’s name, even when it surfaces between us like a live wire he lets lie.

What interests him is the dark.

The downhill run of the land. The places where sound carries and the places where it doesn’t, and what lives in the difference. What the Iron Gospel believes it owns—and what it’s too proud to keep its eyes on.

Lucas watches him the way you watch a blade you know is sharp enough to end things. Not interrupting. Not advising. That alone tells me how close we are to crossing a line the Black Harvest doesn’t like to name out loud.

“Say it,” I tell Malek. My voice doesn’t shake.

That surprises me more than anything else.

He inhales once through his nose. Slow and controlled. His jaw tightens—like the last piece just clicked into place and he’s deciding whether to let anyone else see it.

“There’s a fourth road,” he says.

The relief I should feel never comes.

Instead, dread moves through me slow and certain, because Malek does not say it like he’s found a way out.

He says it like he’s found a way to pay.

Lucas’s mouth tightens. “That road gets people killed, and you damn well know it.”

Malek doesn’t argue. “All of them do.”

I step forward—not toward Malek, but into the space where the choice is being made. I want to feel it when it shifts. I want it to register in my bones so I don’t pretend later that I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.

“What’s the cost?” The question leaves me before I can make myself ready for the answer, and my hand catches the sleeve of his black T-shirt like some stupid part of me thinks fabric can keep him from already leaving.

He turns toward me, and I know before he says it. I know because he looks at me like he has already stepped out of reach, like loving me has become another wound he’s decided he can carry if it keeps everyone else breathing.

His mouth shifts, barely enough to count as softness and too broken to survive as a smile.

“Me,” he rasps.

The word lands wrong. Too small for what it is. Too short for everything it’s carrying.

Not us.

Not the plan.

Not the blood it would take from everyone standing here.

Just him.

The way he says it makes my hand tighten in his sleeve, because it doesn’t sound like strategy. It sounds like surrender that learned how to disguise itself as usefulness.

The Black Harvest stills around us, and even the night seems to lean in, listening.

“You don’t trade pieces like that anymore,” Lucas says quietly. “Not since⁠—”