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“They don’t listen to me.” His voice is rough, but it isn’t grief I hear in it. It’s disorientation, the awful emptiness of a man reaching for a wall that isn’t there anymore.

“I know.”

“They used to.” His eyes stay on mine like looking away might cost him the thread of the room. “The Hollowborn. The Choir. Even the air.”

He swallows.

“Now it’s quiet.”

I tilt my head slightly, watching the way lamplight cuts across his cheek and turns the water amber for a heartbeat before it dulls again.

“Not quiet,” I correct softly. “Different.”

Shadow’s tail thumps once against the floor.

Malek’s gaze flicks to him, then back to me. “They listen to you.”

My fingers tighten on the porcelain.

It isn’t accusation.

It’s fact.

The room seems to lean in around us, walls pressing closer, steam thickening like it wants to keep this moment contained.

“I don’t call them,” I tell him. “I don’t command.”

“No.” His gaze holds mine. “You don’t command. That’s why they’re listening.”

That is the part that lands hardest.

I lean closer, my breath brushing his temple, the cold porcelain biting into my thigh. I don’t raise my voice, but I don’t soften it either.

“You don’t get to disappear,” I murmur. “Not like this.”

His eyes search mine, copper sharp and silver steady, like both of them are trying to decide whether I’m real enough to believe.

“What if I already did?”

I lift one hand slowly, giving him time to see it coming, and press my thumb lightly to the scar at the center of his chest, right where the Binding Thread used to sing. He goes still beneath my touch in a way that doesn’t feel like fear so much as recognition, like his body knows exactly what lived there and still hasn’t learned what to do with the silence it left behind.

“You didn’t disappear.” My voice drops lower. “They buried you under what they made of you, and I watched you crawl out.”

His breath catches.

“They don’t get to keep using your body just because they’re gone.” My thumb stays over the scar, light but certain. “It’s yours now. Stay in it.”

The words don’t save him. They don’t absolve him. They only give him somewhere to stay when the silence gets too wide.

Malek closes his eyes, not in surrender and not in prayer, but like someone bracing for a truth they know will hold even if it hurts.

I stay balanced on the edge of the tub, porcelain slick beneath my palms, steam curling up the walls while the cabin holds its breath around us. The water shifts when he moves, soft and alive, and the sound reminds me how easily bodies can slip out of reach when no one is watching closely enough.

So I watch him.

Not to forgive.

Not yet.