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“I thought you left me to drown.”

Her eyes shine, but nothing falls.

“I did leave,” she whispers. “But I never stopped loving you. Not once. Not even when I thought you’d be better off hating me.”

That’s when it finally breaks—not into rage, not into tears—but into something heavier and worse.

Understanding.

We stand there together, two survivors holding truths sharp enough to cut through bone, and for the first time since the fire, I understand something with absolute clarity.

Malek didn’t just survive the Iron Gospel. He made a choice that left Scarlett standing in the path of what came next.

Cass didn’t just disappear. She left knowing I might hate her for it, because staying felt like a slower way to lose us both.

While I don’t yet know what part of me survives learning that the people who chose me did so by destroying something else first.

But I know this—the cost of being chosen was never going to be paid by one person alone.

And it sure as hell isn’t finished collecting.

XLIII

Scripture Without God

Iwake without permission.

No hymn. No voice telling me when to open my eyes, how long to breathe, where to put the pain. Just light—thin and gray—leaking through warped slats overhead, and the sound of my own pulse beating wrong in my ears, too loud, too close, like it’s trying to climb out.

For a moment, I don’t move.

Not because I can’t.

Because I’m waiting for instruction.

It doesn’t come.

The Iron Gospel trained that into me early: wait for the word, wait for the signal, wait for the hand that tells you what your body is for. Silence was never absence there. It was a held breath. A test. Fail it, and they taught you what stillness cost.

This silence is different.

This one doesn’t want anything from me.

My chest burns.

Not the clean fire of fresh wounds. Not the sharp lesson of a blade. This is deeper—hollow and screaming at the same time, like something essential was torn out and my body hasn’t figured out how to mourn it yet. I lift my hand slowly, watching it shake like it doesn’t recognize me anymore, and press my palm to my sternum.

No iron.

No pull.

No hum.

The Binding Thread is gone.

The absence is worse than the pain ever was. Pain had shape. Purpose. Direction. This is a void where obedience used to live, and my body keeps reaching for something that isn’t there to hold it together.

I swallow. It scrapes all the way down.