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I lift my head slowly and let him see my face.

“We both know that’s a load of shit.”

My voice doesn’t rise. It doesn’t have to. The truth is already standing between us, ugly and breathing.

He moves fast after that, desperate and certain, like every man raised by doctrine believes his conviction is a shield. He reaches for me, reaching for the crown, reaching for the story he thinks he can drag back into place if he grabs hard enough.

I don’t give him room to touch me.

I pivot, step in, and bring the crown up with both hands—not as decoration, not as symbol, but as what it has always been beneath all the hymns: iron shaped into harm.

There’s a brief instant where his black eyes widen, and I see it—the moment his body realizes his faith isn’t going to save him.

Then the crown meets his face with a brutal finality that turns his words into nothing.

He jerks, staggers, the sound that leaves him small and shocked, and I don’t stop because stopping is how people like him crawl back up. I drive the jagged points in again, hard and precise, until his balance breaks and he drops back, hands clawing at empty air like he can grab hold of the world and keep it from ending.

He collapses onto the boards, the altar taking him the way it’s taken so many—without ceremony, without mercy, without even pretending it cares.

My breathing is steady.

My hands aren’t shaking.

The crown is dark against my palms, soot and iron and something warmer clinging to it now, and I look down at him with a cold clarity that tastes like survival.

The altar still provides, just not for the Gospel anymore.

For me.

I straighten slowly with the crown hanging at my side like a verdict, its warped edge still warm against my palm. Shadow’s growl deepens beside me, his stance widening as if he expects the whole settlement to surge forward in defense of its dying myth.

But no one moves.

No one comes.

Beyond the trailers, at the edge of Marrow Ridge where the light thins and the shadows start to behave like doors, the Hollowborn are there—closer than before, threaded through the broken fence line and the ditches and the dead spaces between things. They aren’t watching the Choir member.

They’re watching me.

The way they hold—still, disciplined, attentive—makes my skin prickle with a disgust I can’t name.

I feel it then, that thin thread inside my chest tightening as if something in the dark has recognized a language it’s been waiting to hear.

I keep my face still anyway.

I refuse to flinch.

Malek’s voice comes low beside me, rough but steady.

“Tell me what comes next, little crow.”

I look at him standing in the middle of the place that made him, close enough to see what it costs him not to look away. The smoke is gone, but it feels like his body still smells it. Sunlight catches in his eyes, turning the copper bright and dangerous while the silver stays cold, but his gaze never leaves me.

His fingers move over the ring on his hand.

Once.

Twice.