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My jaw tightens.

Selah feels it.

Of course she does.

She pulls back just enough to look at me, eyes steady, unflinching, and the look is a blade.

“Don’t,” she says.

One word, and it lands like a hand against my chest.

I don’t know if she means don’t look at them, don’t fight them, don’t let them pull me out of this moment, or don’t turn fear into another weapon between us.

Maybe all of it.

I swallow. The altar is under me, the world is around us, and the dark is waiting to see what I do with my hands.

I make the only decision I can trust.

Not for the things watching us from the edge of Marrow Ridge. Not for the altar beneath me. For her.

“Look at me.”

My voice comes out rough, but steady. It isn’t the Gospel. It isn’t a command meant to make her smaller. It’s just the closest thing I have to a hand reaching back without grabbing.

A tether.

A way to keep both of us here.

Her dress is still bunched in her fist, twisted tight like a restraint she put on herself on purpose, like cloth is the last polite thing left between us and she’s daring me to do something about it.

My hands find the fabric, and I pause there long enough for her to stop me.

She doesn’t.

Her gaze holds mine, steady and furious and alive, so I take the dress in both fists. Not gently, not carefully, but with a certainty that feels less like taking and more like answering what she already put in the air between us.

The dress is already half-wrong on her, too much cloth for the way she’s standing over me, too much pretense for what she just demanded, so I pull.

The sound is obscene in the quiet, a long tearing rip that cuts through Marrow Ridge like a new kind of hymn.

Selah stills for one beat, breath catching—not fear. Not surprise. Heat, sharp and immediate, flashing across her face like fire finding air.

I stop with my hands on either side of her waist, the ruined edges of fabric hanging loose between my fists. Her heavy breast bounce as they’re released from the fabric of her dress. Her rosy nipples turn into stiff peaks in cool air.

I swallow as I look up to the splattering of freckles that cover the top of her collar bones, because I don’t trust my own instincts where she’s concerned, and I won’t turn her into something taken.

“Tell me no.” The words scrape out of me, rough and controlled only because I make them that way.

Her gaze holds steady.

“Don’t you dare stop.”

It doesn’t sound like permission.

It sounds like trust with teeth.

So I choose the only thing worth choosing.