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The shadows flow around him like he’s their anchor point. Their source.

He tilts his head. Looks at Preston’s men the way I look at dough. Assessing weight, density, how easy it’ll be to break down.

The void opens behind him.

Not a doorway. Not a portal. Just a wrongness. A hole punched through the fabric of what’s real, and on the other side is nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. My eyes can’t focus on it. Every time I try, my vision slides sideways, my brain refusing to process what it’s seeing.

The pull starts immediately.

Preston’s men feel it. I watch them lean back, boots scraping the pavement, hands clawing for the brick walls. One of them is crying. Another is praying in Spanish, words tumbling out too fast to understand.

The first man becomes airborne.

He doesn’t scream. Can’t. The void swallows sound before it can form. He just flies backward, arms pinwheeling, mouth open in silent horror, and then he’s gone. Erased. Like someone hit delete on his entire existence.

The second tries to run. The shadows catch his ankles, wrap tight, and drag him backward across the filthy pavement. His fingernails scrape grooves in the concrete. Then he crosses the threshold and vanishes.

The third, Leather Jacket, the one with the smooth voice and cold eyes, pulls a gun.

The shot is deafening in the narrow space. My ears ring. The muzzle flash paints the brick walls orange for a split second.

The bullet stops six inches from Malak’s chest.

Just stops. Hangs there, spinning slowly in the air like it’s suspended in honey. I can see the rifling marks on the copper jacket. See it rotating, frozen mid-flight.

Then the void takes it. The bullet disappears with a soft pop, like a soap bubble bursting.

Malak’s voice, when it comes, is barely a whisper. But it fills the alley anyway, resonating off the brick, the pavement, the metal dumpster. “Leave. Or join them.”

Leather Jacket drops the gun. It hits the ground with a clatter that seems impossibly loud. He turns. Runs. His footsteps echo long after he’s gone.

The void snaps shut.

The silence that follows is worse than the screaming. No blood. No bodies. Just the faint smell of ozone and the distant echo of something that might have been a scream. Or might have been my imagination trying to fill the gaps where two men used to be.

Malak turns.

Those black eyes, endless, hungry, void-made-flesh, lock onto mine. And for the first time since that night in my kitchen, I see something other than hunger.

I see fear.

Not of Preston’s men. Not of the gun or the knife or the violence.

Of me.

His gaze drops to my stomach. To the curve beneath my dress. To the thing growing inside me that beats like thunder.

“You,” he says, and his voice cracks on the word. Fractures. Like he’s the one who’s been hollowed out. “What the fuck did you do to yourself?”

CHAPTER 6

Malak

Kaia stands with her back against the brick wall, eyes wide, chest heaving. Her dress is rumpled. There’s a smudge of dirt on her cheek. The bag of yarrow root lies spilled at her feet, its contents scattered across the filthy pavement.

And her stomach.

God, her stomach.