Page 13

“Enough.” The word comes low, rough. He draws in a breath, steadying. “It’s time.”

Time to bury my big sister.

The sister who raised me when no one else would.

Who loved me harder than she ever loved herself.

The weight of it hits all over again, knocking the wind out of me, threatening to pin me right back to the bloody floor I’ve been fighting against. My chest aches with the knowing—no more laughs, no more teasing grins, no more rooms warmed just because she stepped into them.

I’ll never smell that honeysuckle sweetness again—the one that always drifted in with her, brightening every shadow it touched.

All that remains now is silence, and the acrid sting of bleach, and this goddamn grave were about to fill.

Cass’s head turns toward the tree line. Slow. Listening.

“I forgot there was another one,” she says slowly, her voice distant, almost hollow.

I don’t reply. What’s the point? I know what she means—another threat still out there. And I know why she forgot. Watching me bury a hatchet in a man’s skull like splitting firewood has a way of burning everything else out of your head.

I stay rooted where I am, eyes fixed on the fresh mound of dirt covering Scarlett. The world around me blurs into a low, vibrating hum, time stretching tight enough to snap. My lungs burn from holding my breath, but I keep it locked in my chest like letting it out might shatter me.

It takes a beat too long for the quiet to register.

A beat too long for me to feel the emptiness at my side.

I look up—slow, heavy—and the space where Cassie stood is nothing but open air and cold wind. No footsteps. No fading silhouette. She didn’t say my name or touch my arm or wait for me to move.

She’s just…gone. Cass doesn’t disappear. She moves.

The realization punches through me, hollow and brutal. I’m alone—alone with the grave, alone with the dirt that holds my sister, alone with the rage gnawing at the edges of my grief.

Eventually, I feel him.

Malek.

He lingers at the edge of my vision—tall, broad, a silhouette pulled from shadow. Then he steps closer, boots grinding into the soil, the sound dull and final. The air shifts with him, heavy, like the world has to make room.

He doesn’t speak. Doesn’t reach for me. He just stands there, close enough for me to see the black streak cutting through his short blond hair, stark and wrong, like a flaw the world never fixed. My eyes keep catching on it. The rest of him fills in around that line—the scars, the stillness, the weight of a man who knows when silence hurts more than words.

His shadow spills over me and Scarlett’s grave. Shadow whines at my side. I keep my eyes on the dirt.

“This wasn’t random,” he says finally, voice low and steady. “Whatever kept the Iron Gospel cautious has been gone too long.”

His gaze moves toward the tree line.

“Somebody moved a marker. Quietly.”

I don’t ask how he knows. Or who. Or why. Only the cold awareness that something has taken inventory—and I’m on the list.

Fury sparks low in my chest, hot and sudden. It burns at the quiet of him, the weight of his stare, the audacity of him standing here at all—trespassing on a grief that belongs to me and Cassie.

I want to scream at him. Tell him his presence brought those bastards here and ripped my sister away from me, but that would make me just like him—someone who blames survival on whoever’s still breathing.

I turn to glare at him, venom hot on my tongue—but when our eyes meet, the words crumble to ash.

One eye catches the light wrong—silvered, unreadable. The other stays dark and burning. Together they don’t agree on anything. Together they split his face clean in two—judgment and mercy occupying the same space, neither willing to give ground. It makes him look unfinished. Or too finished. Like whatever he is now was earned the hard way.

The look hits me low in the chest. Not cruel. Worse—certain. Like he’s already standing in the aftermath, watching me from the other side of something I haven’t survived yet.