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The tree groans under us, the old wood threatening to betray us both, but I don’t slow time—I want to feel this, the ache in my arms, the strain in my muscles, the normalcy of it. Because any minute now, it won’t be normal. The Hollow will remind us why we’re here, what’s hunting us.

But for now, I let Silas ramble.

“You’re gonna thank me when Luna’s up here,” he adds, waggling his brows as he balances precariously on the limb beside me. “We’ll string up lights, make it romantic. She’ll lose her mind.”

“She’s already lost it if she agrees to climb into this death trap,” I mutter, but I can’t help the way my mouth twitches.

The truth is, this is exactly why I’m here. Why I’ll follow Silas into the stupidest ideas he cooks up. Because when Luna smiles—really smiles, not that brittle thing she’s been wearing since Branwen fell—the world shifts.

“Hey,” Silas says, suddenly serious, glancing at me over his shoulder, dirt smudged on his jaw, green-tipped hair falling in his eyes. “You think she’ll like it?”

I pause, studying him. And despite every sharp-edged quip that wants to leave my mouth, I know the real answer.

“She’ll love it,” I say quietly. “Because you made it.”

Silas grins, bright and boyish and wicked. “Good. Because I already invited everyone.”

Before I can ask what that means, he shoves a plank toward me. “Now hold this, Dain, and stop looking like you want to die. We’ve got a fort to build.”

The moment I spot her, I want to walk into traffic. If there were traffic here. Instead, there’s just the dirt-packed road leading from the Hollow's edge, and the figure coming down it—hip sway too pointed, smile too sweet, that deranged glint in her eye like she’s already writing our wedding vows in her head.

“Oh, fuck me sideways,” I mutter, dropping the plank I’m holding. “Silas.”

Silas, perched on the half-finished platform beside me, squints toward the road. “What?”

I point, dread pooling in my gut like a slow, inevitable car crash. “It’s Esmara.”

Silas’s whole face drops. “Oh no.”

Oh yes.

Esmara, the girl I stupidly, stupidly bound myself to in 1423 when I was still figuring out the art of survival and apparently didn’t give a damn about red flags. The girl who poisoned an entire convent because I flirted with the bartender instead of her. The girl who died dramatically, cursing me by name. And, because fate is cruel, apparently also the girl Silas took to bed one wild, drunken festival night two years before her death.

She’s coming straight for us now, brown curls bouncing, wild smile like she’s just stumbled across her long-lost lovers. Which, unfortunately, is not inaccurate.

“Oh my gods,” Silas says, already backing up. “She looks good.”

“She looks psychotic,” I hiss. “Why is she here?”

“She’s dead, mate. We’re in the Hollow. You do the math.”

I don’t have time to do the math because she’s nearly here, waving enthusiastically like we haven’t spent the last several centuries actively trying to avoid her name. Or grave.

“Elias!” she sings, voice syrup-sweet. “Is that you?”

I plaster on the fakest smile I can manage. “Esmara. Wow. You look… alive.”

“I knew it!” she beams. “I knew you’d be here. The threads were too strong to ignore.”

Silas mutters under his breath, “Yeah, that thread is called delusion.”

Her gaze flicks to him and lights up. “And Silas! I thought I’d imagined it, but there you are! You never wrote back after our night.”

Silas gives me a panicked look. I give him a slow, deliberate smile, because if I’m going down, so is he.

Before she can launch herself at me, I blurt out, “I’m married now.”

Her face falls, like I’ve punched her straight in the stomach. “What?”