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Malek takes the path ahead with that quiet inevitability he carries everywhere, like the morning itself steadies around him. Shadows thin. The trail narrows. The birds should’ve scattered. They didn’t. The woods just watch.

I trail behind, fingers brushing the hatchet at my thigh, not gripping it yet, just reminding myself it’s there.

Then the path curves.

Left.

My stomach drops.

The Cooper place.

Cass never called it training. She called it preparation—lists, drills, rules drilled into me until they lived deeper than instinct.

“Silence keeps you alive. Aim for the head. Don’t hesitate.”

I fought her on every one.

Now she’s gone, and her rules pace my skull like ghosts that refuse to lie down.

“You said Cass was killing herself to hold the line,” I say, trying the words like they might bite. “Why?”

Malek doesn’t slow.

“Because she was.” His eyes stay on the barn. “Rot doesn’t knock.”

“You don’t get to keep me in a glass box.”

He stops.

Doesn’t turn.

“You’re alive.” He says it like that should settle everything. “That’s the only answer I owe you.”

Alive wasn’t the same as untouched—and he knew it.

The barn looms ahead—wood sagging, metal breathing, a faint, uneven clicking leaking out from inside like something counting its time. He pauses half a second too long, like he’s counting exits that shouldn’t exist.

My pulse climbs, sharp and insistent.

Malek faces the door.

“Hesitation gets you killed.” His eyes stay on the barn door. Shadow goes still beside me, ears pinned, body low. “You’ll learn that here.”

Then he opens it.

XVII

Scratches for Days

The door opens with a groan that crawls straight under my skin, not loud but worn thin, like it’s been opened for the same reason too many times and never properly closed again. The sound alone is enough to set my teeth on edge.

The smell hits before I can take a full step inside, wrong in a way my body recognizes faster than my mind does. It isn’t just rot or blood, but something colder and sharper layered beneath the sweetness, chemical and metallic, like iron left too long in meltwater, like meat trying to stay meat after the body holding it already gave up. My stomach turns hard on instinct.

Malek stops me just inside the threshold, his hand twisting into the sleeve of my shirt and yanking me back with enough force to bite fabric into skin. Not skin. Never skin. The distinction lands even as the seam cuts into my arm.

“Look,” he demands.

I don’t want to.