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A small, unconscious tell from a man who would rather bleed than admit this place still has teeth in him.

I was wrong.

A new religion doesn’t need an altar—until it does, until the world gives you nothing clean to put your hands on and you start reaching for anything that feels like certainty. It just needs something worth worshiping, something that answers back, something that doesn’t rot you from the inside out while you call it devotion.

The crown digs into my palm when I shift it, jagged points biting skin and reminding me I’m still in my body, still capable of choosing pain on my own terms. I let the sting live there. I let it steady me.

Then I turn toward the one thing in this center-circle of ruin that’s real enough to bruise me back.

I step into Malek’s space before my mind can turn it into strategy, before fear can make a plan out of what my bones already decided. The air between us tightens like a drawn wire. He goes still—not startled, not retreating—just braced, like his body recognizes the moment as a threat and an offering at the same time.

My fingers catch the front of his shirt.

I fist it hard and pull, not gently, not asking, dragging him the half-step closer until his chest hits mine and the heat of him sinks through my skin like a brand.

His breath catches.

“You want to know what comes next?”

My voice stays low, but something in it has gone clean and cold enough to cut. I don’t look away when I speak. I don’t let the altar or the watching windows or the dark waiting at the edges steal even a piece of me.

“Now you learn the difference between being commanded and being chosen.”

The words land between us hard enough to change the air.

Malek’s throat works once. His hands hover near my hips like he’s waiting to be corrected, like touch is still a rule he’s afraid to break.

I don’t give him time to choose fear.

I pull him closer again, close enough that the ring on his finger scrapes lightly against my knuckles when his hand lifts on instinct. I catch that hand and press it to my ribs, right over my heartbeat, forcing the truth of me against his palm.

“Here,” I tell him, and the single word isn’t soft. It is permission with teeth. It is proof. It is every answer I can give without making this easy for either of us. “Not the Gospel. Not the Choir. Not the dark. Here.”

Behind us, Shadow’s nails click once against the packed dirt, steady and warning and present.

At the perimeter, the Hollowborn shift in unison, a subtle leaning that turns my stomach, as if my movement tugged some invisible thread and the dark answered before I ever opened my mouth.

Malek doesn’t speak.

He doesn’t break.

He just steps in until the space between us becomes something solid, until my back nearly brushes the scorched edge of the altar and his body brackets mine, shielding and caging in the same breath.

When his voice comes, it’s roughened down to truth.

“I don’t know how.”

He admits it like the words have been dragged out of some place in him that would rather bleed than need.

I tip my forehead toward his, close enough that my breath touches his mouth, close enough that he has to feel the difference between being trapped and being held here by choice.

“Then learn,” I breathe against his mouth, my grip tightening in his shirt. “Right now. Stay. And don’t you ever make me survive another one of your choices and call it love.”

His breath catches, and I let my gaze cut past his shoulder once, to the edge of Marrow Ridge where the Hollowborn wait like a congregation starving for a hymn. They shift when I move, all that ruined attention leaning toward us, and something cold rolls through me at the knowledge that the dark is still listening.

Let it.

I look back at Malek and pull him closer, not because the dark needs a command, not because the altar deserves another body, but because he is here and I am here and neither one of us is going back to what this place made us.