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“The Gospel still does,” Malek cuts in.

Not bitter. Not angry. Just certain in a way that makes my chest tighten, because certainty from him has always scared me more than rage. Rage means there is still something fighting. This sounds like a man who has already made peace with the blade.

Something cold crawls up my spine.

“You mean to let them see you,” I say.

His mouth shifts, almost sad.

“Not let,” he corrects. “Take.”

The ground feels farther away than it should, like the whole mountain has shifted beneath me and left my body a second behind.

“Malek, they won’t just take you.” A humorless laugh breaks out of me before I can stop it, thin and wrong in the space between us, because take sounds almost gentle compared to what the Gospel does when it believes something still belongs to them. “They’ll put hands on you. They’ll tear at whatever they think they still own.”

“Little crow,” he says, and damn him for breathing it like goodbye when I am standing right in front of him.

“And you’re still willing?” I demand, the words coming out sharper now, threaded with something dangerous.

His eyes stay on mine, unguarded in a way that hurts more than anger ever could. He isn’t trying to make this easier. He isn’t pretending there’s another version of the choice waiting in the dark. This is it. And he’s letting me see him choose it.

“Yes.”

“You don’t get to decide you’re expendable,” I snap, stepping closer before he can turn sacrifice into strategy again. “That’s their doctrine talking.”

Something flickers in his eyes then—fast and lethal.

“That doctrine kept people alive.” His voice drops into something colder. “Long enough to matter.”

“No.” My voice goes quiet enough to cut. “It kept you useful. There’s a difference.”

Silence detonates between us, impossible and violent, even with every ear already tilted our way.

I look at him then, at the man they named Crownless Wrath and the one I have started to recognize underneath all that ruin, and my chest tightens because somehow both of them are standing in front of me.

“They’ll drag you back into their scripture,” I continue. “They’ll try to finish writing you. Sand down every part of you that spent so long scraping out the rot they put there.”

His jaw shifts.

I don’t let him look away.

“Every part of you they’d call mercy and mean it like sin.”

He exhales slowly. “They’ll start with my name,” he says. “They always do.”

The words break something quiet in me.

Not loudly. Not cleanly. There is no room for that here, not with the Black Harvest standing around us and the mountain listening and Cass somewhere inside a nightmare wearing my voice like a wound. But something inside my chest gives way all the same, soft and terrible, because he doesn’t say it like a fear.

He says it like a goddamn fact.

Like a boy learned once that the first thing they take is what you answer to, and the man standing in front of me has spent years surviving the rest.

My hand lifts before I can stop it, reaching for him on instinct, for his sleeve, his chest, anything solid enough to prove he is still Malek and not the name they carved over him. But I stop before I touch him, because there is no place I can put my hand that will undo what they did.

No touch soft enough to give him back every version of himself they tried to bury.

My fingers curl back into my palm, and it hurts more than grabbing him would have.