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I don’t look for Malek.

The choice registers before the reason does, the way my hand always knows which knife to reach for without consulting my head. Whatever they’ve done to him is loud in the air—iron, blood, the copper-sour tang of pain that’s been allowed to linger—but I don’t follow it. Not yet. That thread pulls later.

I see him anyway.

Not all at once. Not clean.

Just a shape at the edge of the room where light breaks wrong—too still, too upright for someone who chose to be there. Chains bite into his wrists, pulled high enough that his shoulders are wrong, forced back into a posture that isn’t submission so much as display. His head is bowed—not in reverence, not in defeat—but because the angle has been decided for him.

Blood has mapped him, not spilled carelessly, but written with intent.

It tracks down his chest in deliberate lines, dark and drying at the edges, caught in the grooves of scars I recognize and some I don’t. Old wounds reopened. New ones layered where they knew they’d matter. His skin looks torn open and held there, like they wanted whatever was inside him visible. Like they wanted the room to learn his shape by heart.

I’ve seen Malek bleed.

I’ve never seen him made into scripture.

His breathing is controlled, shallow enough to deny them rhythm, but I can see the tremor locked into his arms, the way his hands curl and uncurl once before he stills them. His jaw is set hard enough it looks painful. His eyes are lifted—not unfocused, not gone—but burning with a quiet, feral awareness that tells me he’s still here. Still counting. Still choosing. Still fucking refusing to kneel.

And then his gaze finds mine.

The room doesn’t disappear around him. It sharpens until every wrong thing inside it becomes clearer: Gospel, Choir, every face turned toward me like they already know where I’m supposed to break.

Just the look on his face when he realizes I’m standing, breathing, unbroken—and watches something he buried so deep it had no name come true anyway.

He doesn’t plead.

He doesn’t warn.

He doesn’t shake his head.

He only stills completely, like a man handed the one thing that makes survival worth the pain and forced, in the same breath, to understand what it cost. See her. Remember this. Endure.

Something cold and exact locks into place behind my eyes.

They didn’t just hurt him.

They built this moment. They aimed it.

They staged him—for me.

Every ugly inch of this room has been arranged around one thing: Cass.

She hangs at the center, exactly where the eye is meant to land, where distance collapses into focus whether you want it to or not. Chains run from ceiling to wrists, heavy enough to speak even when they’re still. Wire twists around her hands—not sloppy, not rushed. Someone took time with it. Tightened, paused, tightened again. Enough to keep her present inside the hurt.

Her shirt is torn at the shoulder, fabric stretched and darkened, clinging where sweat dried and didn’t fully leave. There’s a bruise blooming just under her collarbone, yellowing at the edges, which means it isn’t new. Which means she’s been standing like this long enough for pain to change colors.

My jaw locks.

I don’t step forward. I don’t rush. I let my weight settle evenly into my feet, let the ground confirm me the way it always does before violence. The floor is warped here—soft in places from years of knees hitting the same spots. It dips slightly toward her, like the room itself wants an audience.

She’s thinner.

She isn’t starved hollow; she’s been managed, kept just hurt enough to matter and just alive enough to be useful.

Her head lifts with effort, just enough for me to see her eyes, and somehow that hurts worse than if she had collapsed completely because even now, even chained and bleeding, Cass is still deciding how much of herself they’re allowed to witness.

Our eyes meet, and the world narrows to that exchange, the way it used to when we were kids and one of us had already decided something the other was about to help finish.