L I R A 

The bell’s hum follows us all the way back to Hollowbrook.
It isn’t sound anymore, it’s pressure, a low vibration that sits behind my ribs like a second heartbeat. Ezra doesn’t speak. He just stares out the van window, the faint frost veins still glowing under his skin like static trapped in glass. Every bump in the road makes the light shiver.

By the time we reach the shop wing, the power’s flickering. The hall smells like metal and burned ozone. Silas is already there, sleeves rolled, hammer resting against the bench like he never left. He doesn’t ask what happened and just looks at Ezra, then at me, and starts lighting the forge.

“We’ll need containment tools,” he mutters. “If the ink’s blooming again, we can’t let it spread.”

I nod, but my voice won’t work yet. My palms still carry the cold from Deacon’s skin, from the frost that took him. If I stop moving, I’ll see it again.

Callen’s at the door, hood down, watching the way Ezra’s breath fogs in uneven bursts. His eyes catch mine, steady, unreadable, waiting for me to fall apart. I don’t. I can’t.

“We can still fix it,” I say, and it sounds like a lie even to me. “The ledger reacted to the solvent before. If I tune it right, if I find the exact resonance, it’ll undo what it did.”

Ezra flinches at the word undo. The veins along his wrist pulse brighter, spreading higher.

“Lira,” Callen says quietly. “That’s not how it works.”

“It will be tonight.”

I grab the notebook from Silas’s counter and start sketching the mixture ratios by memory, the frost solvents, the copper dust Noor tested during the Silence Rite, the bellwater residue we swore never to touch again. My hand shakes, but Callen’s fingers close over mine, steadying the glass vial before it tips. His touch is warm in the cold.

“Slow,” he murmurs. “You’re tuning too high.”

“I don’t have time to be careful.”

His hand doesn’t move. “Then I’ll keep you steady.”

The first vial cracks before I even pour.
The resonance inside me is running too loud, like the bell itself found my pulse and decided to keep tempo. The sound isn’t really a sound, more like my bones remembering what tolls feel like.

Silas curses under his breath. “That’s the third one.”

“It’s the ink,” I whisper. “It knows we’re trying to erase it.”

The ledger lies open on the metal counter, half-wrapped in forged clamps, frost spreading from the edges like veins reaching for warmth. The ghost-ink on its surface writhes faintly, shifting letters that refuse to hold still. It feels alive. Angry.

I pour the solvent. The liquid hits the page, and screams.

The sound is glass shattering underwater, a thousand whispers cutting through the same breath. Frost veins blast outward from the ledger, spidering across the walls, freezing the shop lights one by one. The air crystallizes.

Mara yelps and covers her camera lens, but light ricochets anyway, flooding her face. When it fades, she’s blinking, confused. One eye is milk-white at the center, like the frost burned straight through her pupil.

“I..I can’t see right,” she stammers, reaching out. “You’re all… blurred.”

Ezra grabs her shoulders to steady her, but his own hands are trembling. The glow under his skin flares, brighter now, racing up his veins like wildfire. He looks at me, terrified. not of pain, but of what it means.

“Stop,” he says, voice raw. “You’re killing yourself for him.”

The solvent hums louder, vibrating through my chest. I can taste metal on my tongue. Callen’s still behind me, one hand on my shoulder, anchoring me through the shaking.

“I’m not doing it for anyone,” I lied.

But I am.

Because the ink is screaming, and if I stop now, Ezra’s name will keep glowing.

The page starts to split down the center, half dissolving into gray ash, the other half burning gold, the light too bright to look at.

I pull back, breath ragged. “It’s… it’s working..”

Then the ledger spasms. The frost veins pulse once, violently, and the gold half flares, etching new letters over what’s left.

Ezra’s name.
Clear. Sharp. Alive.

For a second, no one moves.
The shop hums with aftershocks, glass quivering, the forge fire guttering out. The air smells of burned ink and copper. I can still hear it, the echo of that scream fading through my bones.

Mara’s the first to speak, her voice small. “It stopped. Did it stop?”
Her camera blinks red once, then dies in her hands.

I want to say yes. I want to believe it. But the ledger isn’t silent, it’s breathing. Slow, shallow, alive. The frost veins on the wall pulse faintly with it, in rhythm with the bell somewhere far above us.

Ezra staggers back from the bench, cradling his wrist. The glow beneath his skin flickers, dimming, then sparking again like a heartbeat refusing to fade. “What did you do?” he demands, the words rough, too loud in the hollow room. “You don’t even know what you’re mixing!”

“I followed the resonance,” I say. My voice shakes. “It was the only way to pull your name out.”

“It’s not out!” He thrusts his arm toward me, and the veins flare in response. “It’s worse!”

Callen steps between us, quiet, solid. “Enough.”

Ezra’s laugh is sharp and broken. “Of course you’d say that. You like her bleeding for you.”

“Ezra..”

He grabs my wrist before Callen can stop him. His fingers are ice, the glow beneath his skin bleeding into mine. “You’re killing yourself for him,” he says again, softer this time, like it hurts to speak. “Look at you. You’re shaking. You can’t even stand.”

He’s right. The floor feels unsteady, the resonance still thrumming through me like a fever. Callen’s hand is at my back, steadying me again, and the contact sends another shiver through the air, two frequencies meeting, sparking.

“Let me go,” I whisper.

Ezra’s jaw locks. For a moment, I think he won’t. Then he releases me all at once, stepping back like he’s burned.

Silas kills the forge light. The room plunges into half-dark, the only glow coming from the ledger itself. The page is split straight down the center: one side gray and dead, the other still alive with light. The solvent drips hisses into silence.

I move closer, even though Callen murmurs my name like a warning. The frost recedes as I near it, curling away from my fingertips, as if recognizing me. The erased half looks like ash. The glowing half… shifts. Letters rearrange themselves in molten lines.

E Z R A Q U I N N.

Not erased. Not saved. Something in between.

My breath catches. “It chose him.”

Ezra’s voice is a whisper. “Or you did.”

The words slice through me. I step back, but the page pulses again, brighter, until the edges smoke. A ripple of frost darts up the wall, freezing the clock at 3:03.

Mara fumbles for her phone, trying to capture it, but the lens glitches, white static flashing across the screen. “It’s the same pattern,” she says, voice trembling. “Photo corruption, it’s spreading. The page… it’s copying itself.”

Callen moves beside me, eyes on the glow. “We need to close it before it takes more.”

“How?”

He doesn’t answer. Just reaches out and slams the ledger shut. The sound echoes like a gunshot. Frost bursts outward, then collapses, leaving only silence.

The lights flicker back on one by one.

When I finally look at Ezra, he isn’t looking at me, he’s staring at the ledger’s sealed cover, chest rising too fast. The faint glow under his skin has dimmed to nothing. But on the metal clasp, the frost has spelled one word in clean, perfect lines:

DUE.

He meets my eyes, expression unreadable. “It’s not over.”

And he’s right. Because somewhere deep inside the closed book, the ink screams again, only once, but this time it sounds like my name.