Page 57 of The Baker’s Shadow

Marcus nods once, sharp and final. “The Old Laws protect her. We protect the town. Go.”

Behind us, the council dissolves into chaos as we move for the exit. Marcus barking orders. Moira on her feet. The human lawyer babbling something about calling the police. Rowan just sits frozen, staring at nothing.

We’re halfway to the door when Rowan finally speaks.

“Wait.”

I don’t stop.

“Malak.” Her voice cracks on my name. “Please. He’s my son.”

I pause. Just for a second. Look back at her sitting there, amber eyes filled with something between hope and despair.

“Then stop him yourself.”

Down the hallway, through the empty pub, out into the parking lot. The night air tastes wrong. Too thick. Too sweet. Like something rotting underneath.

“Where are we going?”

Kaia’s breathing hard, one hand on her stomach.

“The Hollow. I need to see how bad it is.”

Another tremor. The ground shifts under our feet.

Somewhere in the darkness, something laughs.

CHAPTER 15

Malak

The sky changes between one breath and the next. Like someone inverted the color, drained it through a filter made of sickness and old blood. Green-black clouds roll in from the direction of the Hollow, moving against the wind, spreading across the stars like spilled ink.

The air tastes like copper and rotting earth.

Kaia stumbles beside me. I catch her elbow, keep us moving. The bakery is three blocks ahead. We just need to reach it. Get inside. Lock the doors. Figure out what the hell comes next.

“What is that smell?” Her voice is tight.

Ozone and decay. Something underneath that makes my shadow-self recoil, trying to pull back into the parts of me that aren’t physical. I know that smell. Haven’t smelled it in centuries, but some things you don’t forget.

“We need to move faster.”

The first tremor hits as we round the corner onto Main Street.

This one tears through the ground like a shockwave, buckling the pavement, shattering windows up and down the block. Car alarms scream. Someone’s dog is barking, frantic and terrified.

The second tremor drops me to my knees.

Pain explodes through my chest, but it’s not physical. It’s deeper, in the part of me that’s bound to the Hollow, woven into its wards and ancient protections, tied to the barrier that’s kept the darkness contained for a thousand years.

Something tears inside me.

I feel it snap like a rope under too much strain. The wards, layer after layer of old magic, each one breaking in sequence. Pop. Pop. Pop. Like bones shattering up my spine.

I reach back through the connection instinctively, trying to catch the broken threads, to hold them together through sheer will. But they slip through my grasp like smoke. Each one that breaks takes a piece of me with it. The first ward was woven when I was young, when the world was different and the Old Ones still walked. The second ward held the boundary between the living and the dead. The third kept the Rot contained in the deepest part of the swamp where even the water feared to flow.

All of them, snapping one after another like a chain breaking under impossible weight.