Page 168

Outside, wind drags through the bare branches and the fence wire sings its thin metallic song. Somewhere beyond the barn, something moves in the dark—rat, fox, whatever it is—and Shadow’s ears twitch once from the floor beside the bed.

He doesn’t get up.

He trusts this place more than he did yesterday.

That’s how safety comes. Not as a gift. As a habit you force into your bones until your body stops flinching at every creak.

Malek’s in my bed.

Not sprawled. Not sleeping easy.

He’s on his side facing the door like he’s still measuring exits even when the threat is only memory. One arm is under the pillow. The other is heavy across my thigh, not gentle, not soft—present. Possessive in the way wounded men become when they finally find something they refuse to lose.

The lamp by the bed throws a weak yellow circle over his face. It catches the scars like pale seams and the split in his lip that’s almost healed, almost. Ash and soot are gone now, washed off at the pump out back, but the world still sits on him like a second skin. You don’t rinse that off.

My leg aches where it was torn open, my hands are raw, and my ribs still complain every time I breathe too deep. The pain has gone dull by now, familiar in the way pain gets when your body realizes nobody is coming to rescue it from itself. It’s proof, I guess. Ugly proof, but proof all the same.

I’m still here.

On the nightstand, a dented tin box sits like a bad joke waiting for someone to laugh first. Inside it, wrapped in cloth because I don’t trust it bare, is the relic. The Binding Thread.

We brought it home, not because it’s holy and not because either of us is stupid enough to believe power becomes safer when you give it a softer name. We brought it home because it’s dangerous, because men will kill for it and call the bloodshed worship, and because leaving it behind would only mean letting the next pulpit-hungry bastard find it first.

It’s quiet now, but I can feel it anyway, cold through the fabric in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. Like a heartbeat waiting on permission. Like a loaded gun pretending it’s just another thing on a table.

I keep looking at it, and every time I do, the room feels a little smaller.

Loose ends aren’t neat in this world. They don’t tie themselves off and disappear because you bled enough, prayed enough, or loved somebody hard enough to deserve a damn break. They come back hungry. They come back wearing familiar faces. They come back knocking.

Someone will notice the High Revelation is gone. Someone will climb into that empty pulpit and start speaking like God with a mouth full of rot. Someone will decide the relic belongs to them, the way men always decide women and power and safety belong to them.

And when word spreads that it’s here, at this farm, in this room, within arm’s reach of a girl who refuses to bow, they’ll come.

Malek shifts beside me, not fully waking, but reacting the way his body always does, ready before his mind has even climbed out of the dark. Copper opens first, bright and feral. Silver follows, colder, sharper, cutting straight through the room like it already knows where the threat is hiding.

“Cass.”

One word. A check. A wound he keeps pressing because she’s alive enough to hurt over.

“She’s out,” I whisper. “Snoring like she owns the world.”

His jaw tightens once, and relief almost makes it to his face before he strangles it back down. He looks toward the wall between us and my sister like he could see through the plaster if he stared hard enough, like he could count the rise and fall of her chest and bully it into staying steady forever.

Then he looks at me.

He doesn’t soften, and he doesn’t pretend we’ve won anything clean.

“They’ll come.”

I nod because denial is for people who haven’t had to bury anything.

“Evil typically does.”

His hand slides up my leg, slow and careful, asking without asking. When it settles at my hip, his fingers don’t dig in. They just stay there, warm and certain, like he needs the contact to keep himself in this room, in this bed, under this roof where Cass is still breathing on the other side of the wall.

“If you stay,” he murmurs, his voice low and even in a way that makes it worse, “peace doesn’t come with me.”

It isn’t a warning, not exactly. It feels more honest than that. The truth, laid between us without dressing it up first.