Page 50 of Hollowed

He hadn’t told me.

He had known.

And he hadn’t told me.

I ran my fingers over her name. The ink flaked beneath my touch. The line through it was final. Harsh. Unforgiving.

She hadn’t been forgotten.

She had been removed.

And I?—

I was what they sent next.

The girl who looked like her.

The girl who burned like her.

But didn’t break.

I closed the book.

And I didn’t cry.

Because it didn’t hurt.

It clarified.

I wasn’t the first.

But I would be the last.

I carried the book like it was breathing.

Its weight felt different now. Heavier. More intimate than flesh, more brutal than chain. I didn’t need to open it again to feel her name beneath my fingers. Amare. My mother. Crossed out. Twice. A name not lost but exiled.

It wasn’t grief I felt.

It was inheritance.

It was the echo of a vow she couldn’t finish pulsing like blood behind my teeth.

I didn’t look for him.

I didn’t need to.

He was already watching me.

He stood in the doorway of the alcove, half-shadowed, arms loose at his sides like they didn’t know whether to hold or hurt. His robe hung open. His throat was bare. The mark above his heart was visible—the broken circle, carved not with ceremony but survival.

He didn’t speak. He just looked at me like he was waiting to see what I would do now that I knew. Now that I’d seen what he never said.

I rose slowly.

Carried the book with both hands.

Held it out to him.

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