The hands pulled Jacob toward the heart with terrifying gentleness.
Not to kill him.
To replace Emily.
He slashed with the key, severing fingers that regrew instantly, each new bone sprouting veins that lashed at his wrists. Eleanor grabbed his arm not to stop him, but to press his palm against her inked chest.
"Take it," she begged. "Take what's left of me."
Her skin peeled away under his touch, revealing not muscle but pages parchment covered in cramped handwriting that squirmed like trapped insects. Her life. Every cycle. Every lie. Dates and names bled together:
Daniel, age 12, hands shaking as he kissed me behind the stables. "When the time comes," he whispered, "eat the truth."
Thomas, the stable boy, his throat cut for giving me a key. His last words: "The roses remember."
Myself, age unknown, carving the first sigil into Daniel's chest. His tears tasted like salt and rust. "I'm sorry," I lied. "This will help you forget."
The crow shrieked a warning as the heart's veins lashed out, piercing Eleanor's throat. She choked, but her remaining eye blazed as she tore the pages free and shoved them into Jacob's mouth.
The taste was Snow and blood. A younger Eleanor pressing a rusted key into his palm, her fingers trembling. "Plant them where it won't look," she whispered. "In the angel's garden." Himself as a child, digging bare-handed in the dirt, burying seeds that weren't seeds at all but teeth tiny and sharp, each one carved with a name.
Last night in the asylum, Eleanor's bandaged face pressed to his. "The heart isn't the cage," she gasped. "You are."
Jacob understood.
He spat the pulped pages onto the blood-key.
The metal melted, reforming into a scalpel—the same one from his earliest memory.
Emily's stitched lips twitched into a smile.
As Jacob plunged the blade into the heart, the cage didn't break.
He did.
His ribs unfolded with a sound like snapping branches, becoming new bars. His veins wove themselves into the old cage's structure, threading through the bones of long-dead children. Emily's tiny body slid free as Jacob's flesh hardened around the heart, his skin cracking into porcelain-like plates.
The last thing he saw before his eyes petrified:
Eleanor catching Emily's limp form.
The crow perched on his new bone bars, its beak brushing his frozen cheek.
And the Hollow Priest kneeling beside him, whispering with a voice that was suddenly, terribly familiar:
"Welcome home, brother."