Page 8

The Fence Was Never for Keeping Them Out

Too bad Cass didn’t believe in down time any more, said it was a luxury we couldn’t afford and neither could the chores. So I was out here anyway, knees pressed into cold dirt, fingers combing through leaves for acorns to grind into flour. Bitter as sin, but it filled the cracks in our hunger, and that was enough to keep us moving.

I’m only a few yards past the back fence. Close enough that I could still call it an accident.

The forest has gone wrong somehow. Not the quiet of an empty place—the quiet of something watching. Waiting to see what I’ll do next.

I rise slowly, one hand finding the hatchet at my thigh. Shadow is a few yards off, muzzle down in the leaf litter, tail dragging, ears turning like antennae.

“Shadow.” Just above a whisper. “Come here, boy.”

His collar doesn’t answer.

This fucking dog.

Ms. Cooper flashes through my mind—her slippers, her ruined mouth, the way she froze before the shot.

The underbrush doesn’t answer.

Only the trees, too close, too still.

Then—

“There you are, little crow.”

Everything inside me stops.

Six years and he still says it the same way—low, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and knows I’m not going anywhere.

I turn.

Malek Vane.

Leaning against a tree like the whole dead world built him a throne. The shadows fold around his shoulders as if they know better than to stray too far. He looks older now. Harder. Violence made flesh. A man the Reckoning forgot to bury.

My pulse spikes. I take one step back, then another.

Malek Vane isn’t a man you fall for. He’s the kind you survive—if you’re lucky.

Light rakes across the scars slashing his face—jagged white ridges carved deep, like someone tried to carve something holy out of him and failed. They don’t soften him. They sanctify him.

One eye gleams silver. The other burns brown and dark, like a coal refusing to die.

Violence doesn’t just cling to Malek Vane.

It crowns him.

My fingers tighten around the hatchet. Habit, not hope. We both know it wouldn’t matter.

His mouth curves, faint and cruel. “Miss me?”

The sound of his voice is a punch straight to the ribs. It rattles all the memories I’ve spent six years shoving into dark corners. The last time I saw him, his hands were covered in his brother’s blood.

“Fuck you,” I say automatically.

He laughs once, humorless, scrubbing a hand through his ashen-blond hair—the black streak stark as a fault line. “Still got that mouth.”

“Still got that face,” I shoot back, though my gaze keeps catching on the new scars, the tight lines at the corners of his eyes. “What do you want?”