Page 62

A symbol over the Hollowborn’s collarbone catches the weak light: a ring with three slashes carved straight through it.

The mark is familiar in a way that makes my stomach turn before my mind can catch up, like my body recognizes the danger faster than I do.

I’ve seen it before.

On trees. On stones. Scratched into places Malek watches too carefully and touches like he hates needing to. I’ve seen it enough these past few months that it should only scare me as a warning, as one more ugly piece of the world I don’t understand yet.

But then my gaze drags to his arm.

I don’t want to look. Every part of me knows not to, knows that whatever I find there is going to change the shape of something between us, but his sleeve has slipped up in the struggle, baring the inside of his forearm, and there it is.

Waiting in his skin.

Raised. Pale. Permanent.

The same shape carved into the Hollowborn, only Malek’s is older. Deeper. Knotted into him like the wound never learned how to close right. Like whoever put it there didn’t care if he healed, only that he remembered.

Like the Gospel practiced on him first.

My vision tunnels. The woods seem to hold their breath, the silence turning thick and sentient around us.

“Malek…” My voice trembles. “This symbol. You have it carved into you.”

He doesn’t flinch.

He doesn’t breathe.

He goes still in a way that feels ancient—like a man stepping back into a memory he’s spent years trying to bury alive.

“You said these were Gospel commands,” The words scraping out of my throat. “So why do you have the same one they carved into a Hollowborn?”

His eyes close—slow enough that I feel the weight of it, the ache, the cost—like letting the truth surface physically hurts him. For a heartbeat, the world seems to hold still with him. Even the rot in the air waits.

Then he exhales—slow, ragged, not defeated but resigned, like he’s finally stopped fighting a truth he’s been dragging behind him for years.

“Selah,” his voice splinters under the weight of something old and ugly he hasn’t forgiven himself for. “Don’t look away. You have to hear this—and you have to understand it before anything else.”

I swallow hard. The cold digs deeper, settling under my skin like something sentient and unwelcome.

“Understand?” I ask. The words shake. “What are you not saying?”

Malek opens his eyes, and it’s worse than fear.

It’s recognition.

He looks at the Hollowborn like a man staring at a grave he dug with his own hands.

“The Iron Gospel don’t hunt Hollowborn,” he says, quiet but edged in a darkness he’s not bothering to hide anymore.

A pause—thick enough the forest seems to bow under it.

“They don’t fear them.” His marked arm comes up slowly, deliberately, as if he’s revealing the piece of himself he hates most.

“They command them.”

The woods shift at the edges of my vision.

The wind picks up—cold, papery, threading through dead leaves. Something rattles in the branches overhead, a crow or a bone or both. A ribbon of incense-rot slithers beneath my tongue. My knees nearly give.