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The thud lands low, vibrating up through the ground and into my bones. The world seems to shudder with it. He lifts a hand and wipes his brow, dragging blood across his temple, marking himself without looking, like it doesn’t even register anymore. The smear looks wrong on anyone else.

On him, it fits.

I realize my fingers are curled tight against the doorframe, nails biting into wood, my heart slamming hard enough to ache. I’m watching him the way you watch weather rolling in—aware of the danger, aware of the pull, already knowing I won’t move until it’s too late.

And God help me, I don’t want to.

“When the Gospel named me The Crownless Wrath, it wasn’t poetry, little crow.”

Some part of me has always known.

Not in words. In the way the air changes at the fence line. In how the woods thin out instead of pressing close. In how even the rot knows where to stop.

The Iron Gospel never came this far.

Cass was the only one who ever crossed the line.

This stretch of dying earth stayed untouched while the world around it tore itself apart.

I watch Malek lift the deer onto the hook, shoulders bunching, muscle sliding under a shirt soaked through with sweat and blood. The metal creaks. The sound carries. His scars catch the light as he moves—raised and ridged, cut deep enough they don’t look healed so much as claimed, like something was written into him and never erased.

My pulse ticks hard.

It isn’t that the world survived him.

It’s that the world learned to give him room.

The thought settles hot and heavy in my chest, rearranging things I didn’t know were still loose. The way he keeps distance. The way he sharpens every word aimed at me. The way anger comes easier than anything that might ask him to stay.

He doesn’t hate me.

He uses it because it weighs less than wanting. Because anger is something he knows how to carry without dropping it. Because whatever lives underneath—affection, concern, need—feels like a weakness he was taught would be used against him.

I grip the doorframe harder, wood biting into my palm.

And for the first time, I understand that what keeps this place safe isn’t the land.

It’s him.

And the cost of standing this close to it.

My eyes slide to Scarlett’s garden without asking permission. It used to breathe—green and soft, leaves brushing bare ankles, dirt dark and rich enough to stain your palms. Now it’s all brittle stalks and snapped stems, the ground pale and exhausted. A graveyard wearing the shape of something that once fed us. I recognize it too easily. The way it’s still standing without really living. The way it keeps going out of habit instead of hope.

Behind me, there’s a sound—dull, wet, final.

Malek drops the carcass onto the station and the impact lands low, heavy enough that I feel it in my teeth. Blood spills fresh and hot, slicking down his forearms and over his hands, dripping into the dirt like the ground is used to taking from him. The smell thickens. Iron. Heat. Endings.

Something in my chest tightens.

The garden is dying because the world is cruel.

Malek is still standing because he learned how to be cruel back.

And somehow, impossibly, we’re both still here.

“What’s left?”

Me. I’m what's left.