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“I decided it when the air shifted,” he says. No heat. No edge. Just fact. “You felt it too.”

I want to argue that I didn’t—that whatever’s been crawling up my spine since he said when is just nerves, just memory, just the echo of Cass’s voice living where my calm should be. But the woods are too quiet for lies. Even my breath sounds loud, fogging the air in front of my face like a warning I can’t ignore.

Shadow drifts closer to my leg, shoulder brushing mine, his ears flat and listening to something I can’t hear yet. The path ahead bends out of sight, trees leaning in tighter, and the night feels thinner there, stretched like skin over bone.

Malek veers off the trail without waiting for me.

I hesitate for half a heartbeat—long enough to feel it itch in my muscles, long enough to hate myself for it—then I follow, fingers tightening around the hatchet.

The ground changes the second I leave the trail. Pine needles give way to damp loam, soft and treacherous underfoot, the smell of rot rising sharp and sweet like something split open too long ago. Branches crowd closer, snagging at my sleeves, cold bark scraping my knuckles as if the woods are taking inventory of what I’m made of.

The air thickens here—heavier, quieter—every sound swallowed before it can travel far. Even my breathing feels intrusive, like I’m trespassing on a secret that doesn’t want witnesses.

Malek doesn’t look back, but he slows just enough that the distance between us shrinks without me meaning it to. Close enough that I notice the shift in his shoulders, the subtle tension there, like memory has teeth and it just sank in. My steps start to line up with his without effort, my pace adjusting to his like my body remembers this even if my mind doesn’t.

“You always take this cut,” I say, more to the dark than to him. “Not the path. This.”

He exhales through his nose, a quiet, humorless sound. “Habit.”

Something about the way he says it—flat, old—makes my stomach tighten.

“You were closer than you let on,” I murmur, the thought settling heavy and unwelcome. Images flicker uninvited: nights I thought I was alone, the sense of being watched I chalked up to fear. “All that time.”

“I don’t miss screams,” he says. “Especially not yours.”

The woods seem to lean in.

I see it in a flash—Mrs. Cooper, the weight of her shadow, the way the air went thin, the moment my body locked before instinct finally snapped loose. The smell of rust and dust. The sound my own heart made when it realized it might not get another chance.

“You were there,” I say, quieter now. Not a question.

“I heard you,” he says. “Your breath changed. Same way it did just now.”

The woods press closer, branches creaking softly, like they’ve been holding onto that truth longer than I have. Malek starts forward again, deeper into the dark, and I follow without thinking.

Because the most dangerous thing isn’t that he was there.

It’s that he’s always been closer than I ever knew.

I always pictured the Black Harvest as ghosts with engines—men who never stayed long enough for the ground to remember them. Leather and chrome and the open road, sleeping where momentum finally gave out, nowhere ever solid enough to call home. That’s what the stories said. That’s what I believed.

The lodge proves me wrong.

It squats against the mountain like it’s grown there, logs darkened with age and weather, antlers nailed above the door bleached pale as old bones. Cabins dot the slope around it, half-swallowed by brush, smoke scars climbing their chimneys. The place smells lived-in even now—cold ash, old grease, damp wood—like absence hasn’t quite chased everyone out yet.

My chest tightens.

This wasn’t wandering. This was settling.

I stop without meaning to, boots sinking into gravel worn smooth by years of use, and the distance rearranges itself in my head. Two hours. Maybe less if you knew the cuts through the trees. Close enough to feel. Close enough to hear things you weren’t supposed to.

So this is where he lived.

Not some far-off legend on the other side of the world—just over the mountain. Close enough that the nights I swore I was alone suddenly feel…questionable. But it actually made perfect sense. How he managed to act like an unseen shield all this time.

How he always seemed to know when the line was about to break. When the woods went too quiet. When rot started pressing in from the edges before I ever smelled it. I thought it was instinct. Experience. The kind of vigilance men like him wear like a second skin.

But shields don’t appear out of nowhere.