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Once, then again and again.

Something snaps with a wet, rope-breaking sound. Its shriek collapses into a choking gargle as I scramble up its thrashing body and drive the plank into the base of its skull with everything I have left.

It convulses.

Then stills.

Silence slams down so hard my ears ring.

I’m shaking violently. Blood—mine and theirs—slides down my leg, warm and sticky, blurring where the scratches end and everything else begins. My calf throbs, heat pulsing low and wrong, like something settling in.

Malek is still there, exactly where he was, like he never moved and never meant to. He watches me breathe, watches me find my footing again, like he’s taking inventory of what survived.

He doesn’t come any closer and he doesn’t touch me, but his eyes drag over me anyway—my posture, my breath, the blood I haven’t wiped away yet—before settling on my leg. He looks just long enough to count, and something tightens in his jaw when he’s done. Not surprise. Calculation.

I don’t stop walking.

My leg drags. I let it. Let the blood mark my path like proof. The barn reeks of iron and rot and whatever used to be human, and my lungs still burn from screaming and swinging and refusing to die.

He’s behind me. I can feel him there—coiled, watching, calculating. Waiting for collapse.

I give him none.

“Hesitation gets you killed,” I say, voice wrecked and wild, thrown back over my shoulder like a blade I’ve been saving.

That gets him.

I hear it—the sharp inhale he doesn’t mean to take. The faint shift of his boots in the dirt.

“You said I’d learn that here,” I continue, limping harder now, every step screaming but still mine. I stop just past him, close enough that he has to turn his head to see me. Close enough that he smells the blood and rot and heat rolling off my skin.

I turn slowly.

My calf is shredded—four deep rake marks, red and swelling, skin already pulling wrong. I don’t hide it. I angle it toward him like an offering. Like a challenge.

“I didn’t freeze,” I snarl. “Didn’t beg. Didn’t hesitate.” And for half a second, the barn stays quiet—like it is waiting to see what I’ll do next.

My mouth curves—not a smile. Something sharper.

“I killed them.” The words sit there, heavy and undeniable. “And I walked out.”

His jaw tightens. That silver eye goes razor-bright. The other darkens, storm-deep.

I step closer. One more inch. My voice drops—low, vicious, intimate.

“So don’t look at me like I failed,” I whisper. “Because if hesitation gets you killed”—I flick my gaze down to the blood, then back up to his face—“what does it say that I’m still standing?”

Because for the first time since the world ended, I didn’t survive Malek Vane.

I fucking matched him.

I don’t go home.

My feet take me where they always do when the world tilts too hard—past the fence, past the bare patch where nothing grows right anymore, to the fresh mound that still looks wrong against the land.

Scarlett’s grave doesn’t smell like death yet. Just turned earth and cold grass and the faint sweetness of something alive trying anyway.

I drop to my knees before I feel them hit. Dirt presses into my palms, gritty and damp. My leg burns where the Hollowborn scraped me, heat spreading slow and ugly, but I ignore it. Pain can wait. This can’t.