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I scan the clearing the way Cass taught me to when something goes wrong—slow, deliberate, left to right. Rocks. Pines. Shallow dips where someone could stand and watch without being seen. The places danger prefers when it’s pretending not to exist.

Nothing moves, and that’s the other wrong thing.

Malek always moved. Not loudly. Not constantly. Just enough to register. A shift of weight. A breath. The quiet gravity of someone who occupies space like it was never freely given.

Now the space beside the fire is clean in a way it never is after a night with him in it. No pack within reach. No tools laid out with that meticulous, almost reverent order. The ground where he sat last night is flattened and cold.

I cross to where our packs were stacked, my hands already numb before I touch anything. Some part of me knows exactly what I’m about to find and is trying—badly—to soften the impact.

His pack is gone, not misplaced, not tucked aside, not moved in the careless way things get shifted around camp, but gone with the kind of intention that makes my stomach drop before the rest of me is willing to understand why.

The Black Harvest’s packs still sit there like a dropped sentence, supplies and proof and warning all wrapped into one. The world continuing on its axis even while mine tilts.

I reach for the smaller bundle without thinking—the cloth-wrapped one he unrolled with care last night, like it mattered more than it wanted to admit. The Binding Thread. Braided metal too deliberate to be decoration and too purposeful to be harmless.

My fingers close on air.

The cloth lies there, folded back on itself, empty.

My lungs seize around a breath I don’t finish taking.

For a moment, my mind does what it always does when grief arrives early—it constructs a version of events that lets me stay upright.

Maybe he went to scout.

Maybe he’s circling the perimeter.

Maybe he’s close enough to hear me if I say his name one more time.

Then Shadow steps directly into my path, body braced, tail low, blocking the downhill slope like he was given this line to hold and nothing else matters. His eyes flick up to mine, and something in them feels like betrayal.

Mine, I realize, because some stubborn, stupid part of me is still trying to call this improvisation when every empty space in camp has already arranged itself into choreography.

My jaw aches as I swallow back the sound. My hands curl and uncurl uselessly at my sides. Cold creeps up my wrists and into my elbows, like the mountain is testing whether I’m ready to be claimed too.

I force myself to look for proof—something that doesn’t care how badly I want to be wrong.

Tracks.

Footprints cut through the dirt beyond the fire pit, deep enough that the earth still holds the shape of him. One set leads away from camp and down the slope, and I know his stride before I let myself think his name—the spacing, the weight, the ugly steadiness of a man who wasn’t running and wasn’t dragged.

He chose this.

That is what finally makes the morning tilt beneath me.

I follow them to the edge of the clearing where the ground drops away into shadow and trees. The prints dissolve into pine needles and shale, swallowed by terrain that erases evidence on purpose.

But the absence they leave behind is deafening.

The Hollowborn passed through here last night. I know that. I felt them. And yet there’s no sign of them now—no torn earth, no snapped branches, no smear of rot clinging to bark.

Just Malek’s footprints.

Just his decision.

Just the clean, brutal line of someone who knows how to walk straight into hell without leaving a trail back.

The memory crashes into me all at once: black eyes with that copper sheen lifting past me in the dark, not listening to my breathing or my heartbeat, not caring about the blood moving hot beneath my skin.