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But he doesn’t stop Shadow.

Doesn’t reach. Doesn’t tense. Doesn’t even bother tracking the man across the yard.

Somehow that unsettles me more than if he’d put a knife in his hand.

The second figure—kneeling—steals the air from my lungs.

He’s folded in on himself like his bones forgot their purpose, spine bowed too far, shoulders hunched inward as if he’s trying to collapse into the dirt instead of kneeling on it. His robes hang in rotted strips, cloth stiff with old stains, and his fingers claw into the earth with black-rimmed nails, digging like he’s trying to burrow down toward something waiting beneath the surface. The frost around him is torn and smeared, the ground disturbed in a way that feels less like struggle and more like refusal—like the earth itself recoiled and failed.

The air feels wrong. Too tight. Wound too far. Like the world is holding its breath, waiting to snap instead of exhale.

“Found him walking your property line,” the man standing says. The kneeling man twitches when he speaks, like the words weren’t his to choose.

His voice is calm. Practical. Too calm. Like he’s reporting weather instead of heresy.

“Came to warn you,” he continues. “There’s movement—Hollowborn horde. Looks like they were sent.”

Sent.

The word settles heavy in my chest, clicking neatly into place beside the memory of the thing wired upright in the woods days ago, scripture carved into dead flesh like the world itself had been repurposed as a sermon board.

Malek doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t look at the man either.

“Figures.” He doesn’t sound surprised, and somehow that makes it worse. “We found one already.”

The man standing nods once.

No argument. No follow-up. No flicker of shock.

Like finding one was never the nightmare.

I clock it then—the way Malek’s shoulders stay level. The way his weight doesn’t shift. The way his breathing doesn’t change. Whatever history sits between them, Malek isn’t braced for betrayal.

I ease a fraction. Not trust. Not yet. But my spine loosens just enough to breathe.

The kneeling man laughs.

The sound is wet and thick, wrong enough that my skin prickles as if the air itself doesn’t want to carry it.

Then he says my name.

“Selah Crow…”

It slurs out of him, dragged through ruin, shaped by a mouth that shouldn’t still know how to make words, and my heartbeat stumbles hard enough that I feel it in my throat. Slowly—horrifyingly—he lifts his head.

Half his jaw is gone.

Not cut. Torn. Ragged and uneven, like something worried at it until it gave way. Blackened rot strings from the ruin of his mouth, glossy and thick, dripping down to splatter against the dirt, and my breath locks somewhere high in my chest as he lifts his hand.

A photograph.

Small. Bent. Worn soft at the corners.

My face stares back at me.

Not recent. Not stolen. Old. Pre-reckoning. From a life that feels like it belonged to someone else now—before Cass, before the world learned how to take things without asking.

My vision swims.