Page 63

“You’re lying.” I don’t realize I’ve said it until the words scrape out of me. “You’re—you’re lying, Malek.”

“If only.”

A hollow sound cracks in my chest, too soft to be called a sob.

“They’re monsters,” I shake my head so hard my vision blurs. “They killed people—we watched them tear through whole rows of trailers, Malek. They don’t take orders. They don’t⁠—”

“They take scripture,” he says, and the words cut deeper than any blade.

My skin prickles. The air tastes metallic, like cold pennies melting on my tongue.

“But why?” I still ask, though the question feels childish the second it leaves my mouth. “Why would the Gospel care where Hollowborn go? Why would they—” My voice breaks. “Why would they send one here?”

Malek flinches.

It’s barely there—a tightness at the corner of his eye, a breath cut short—but with him, even the smallest crack feels catastrophic.

“Selah,” he says carefully, “they didn’t send it here.”

The air seems to thin. “What?”

“They sent it for you.”

My pulse stutters hard, tripping over itself. “For—me?” My laugh comes out sharp, unstable. “That’s insane! They don’t know me. I’m not—Malek, I’m not anything.”

His jaw locks, a vein ticking like he’s strangling something violent back down.

“Don’t you dare fucking say that.” His voice changes, not louder—worse. “Not when you have no idea what you are.”

“What I am?” My voice comes out thin, almost swallowed by the trees. “Malek, that thing is wearing your mark.” My gaze cuts back to the Hollowborn, to the scripture carved into rot like somebody thought the dead could still obey. “So don’t tell me I don’t know what I’m saying. Tell me why they sent it to me.”

“Because they weren’t hunting you, little crow.” His voice goes quiet enough to make my skin tighten. “They were testing what would wake up.”

His eyes flick to the sigil carved into his own skin—a matching wound, a brand of the life he crawled out of.

“They save consecrated ones for punishment. For traitors.”

The word lodges under my ribs and stays there, sharp and heavy.

“And they know,” Malek says, quieter now, darker, “that taking you is the fastest way to remind me what they failed to make me.”

My breath stutters. “I’m not a hymn,” I whisper. “I’m a problem.”

“Selah.”

My name snaps out of him like a blade drawn too fast. Not comfort. Warning. Something shifts behind me.

Not sound.

Not motion.

Authority.

The light thins at my back, not dimming so much as withdrawing, like the forest itself has recognized a hierarchy and stepped aside. The air goes cold—chapel-cold—heavy with old incense and obedience left to rot.

Cloth whispers. A presence stands where nothing stood a breath ago. No footsteps. No broken brush. Like he’d been there the whole time and the woods just agreed not to show him.

Malek feels it.