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“Selah…”

“You’re all scars and anger.” My voice comes out softer than I mean it to. “But you’re still here anyway.”

His breath changes—subtle, but I hear it. His nostrils flare like he’s fighting the instinct to turn this into a threat, to push back instead of standing still.

His hands betray him first. Just a faint tremor, there and gone, like his body hasn’t caught up to the lie of control yet.

“Surviving isn’t the part you should trust,” he says quietly. “It’s what I had to become to keep doing it.”

“No.” The word comes out rough. Certain. “You don’t get to drop something like that between us and expect me to kneel under the weight of it.” My lungs burn as I force air in. “I’m not them. I don’t fear you just because they did.”

His gaze drops to my mouth, then my throat, then my hands—steady, stubborn, refusing to tremble for him.

When his eyes rise again, they’re darker. Hurt and hunger and anger braided tight.

“They didn’t fear the scars,” he murmurs. “They feared how easily I learned the lesson.”

My throat tightens. I swallow anyway.

“I’m not afraid of your ruin,” I whisper.

The kitchen seems to draw in around us, walls closing a fraction, like the world itself has paused to see which way he’ll break. Something dark and unsteady crosses his face—something caught between retreat and gravity, between the instinct to pull away and the danger of wanting to come closer.

“You should be,” Malek murmurs, his voice rough, frayed at the edges.

“No.” I step into his heat before the word can cool. “I’m not.”

His mismatched eyes drag over me—my jaw, my throat, my hands still stained from tending his wound, evidence I didn’t flinch when I had the chance.

“Why?” he rasps, like the question costs him.

“Because ruin doesn’t scare me,” I breathe. “Being powerless does.”

His chest rises sharp, breath stolen clean out of him.

I don’t blink.

“And I’m done being powerless.”

The silence that follows hums, tight and live, stretched thin between us, sparking everywhere we refuse to touch.

He looks away first.

Not because he’s finished—but because holding my gaze hurts more than he’s ready to admit.

The screen door groans sometime later. Cold air crawls under the jamb. I hear the drag before I see him.

A wet drag. A dull scrape. Something heavy being hauled uphill through brush and stone. My body tenses before my mind catches up, breath snagging high and shallow like it recognizes the shape of danger before I do.

Then he crests the hill.

The weight over his shoulders is unmistakable—dead mass slung wrong, legs dangling loose—but Malek carries it without strain, spine straight, pace unbroken. Blood slides down his forearms in thick, dark lines, warm enough that steam ghosts off it in the cool air. It drips from his fingers in slow, deliberate beads that strike the dirt with soft, final sounds.

The smell hits next. Iron. Heat. Fresh kill.

Dawn catches the sheen on his skin and turns it molten, like the light itself doesn’t know whether to sanctify him or recoil. My pulse thuds in my ears, loud enough to drown out everything else. I don’t step back. I don’t step forward. I just stand there, caught in the doorway, lungs burning as if I forgot how to breathe somewhere between the hill and my chest.

He reaches the yard and lets the carcass hit the dirt.