Page 100 of Property of Scar

Deeper than I know what to do with.

And for the first time in a very long time, I can feel every part of myself again.

“You all right?” she asks, and there is something almost careful in it, something underneath the question that is checking on me. The fact that she is checking on me, now, like this, makes something in my chest pull tight in a way that has nothing to do with want and everything to do with her specifically, this woman, this particular version of stubborn, fierce, and quietly, relentlessly kind underneath all of it.

“No,” I tell her honestly, holding her gaze. “I don’t think I am.”

Her brow creases slightly.

“I think…” I say, my voice rough, “… you just tore down centuries’ worth of walls.” My hand slides along her jaw. “And the crazy part is, I don’t want the damn things back.”

The crease softens. Something moves across Cali’s face, quick and unguarded, there and gone, and then she leans down until her mouth is close enough to my jaw that I feel her breath when she speaks.

“Good,” she says quietly. “Hold that thought.” Then she moves, and the last of my coherence goes with it. This—the word lands in my chest like a struck chord—this is what I forgot.

My hands find her hips and hold, not gently, because gentle is not what either of us is interested in tonight, and she has made that abundantly clear. She rolls forward over me, and the sound that comes out of my chest is rough enough to surprise even me. It drags itself loose from somewhere deep, from a place that’s been locked down for so long I’d almost forgotten it was there.

Years of discipline, restraint, and keeping a tight grip on every damn thing, and she cuts straight through it without even trying.

The sound follows her movement, carrying the weight of something that’s been asleep for far too long and has finally found a reason to wake up. She drops her head and sets her teeth into my shoulder, dhampir strength behind it, real pressure, the kind that would destroy a human and barely registers on me except as a bright, clean line of ‘Yes, exactly that.’ I drag her closer, my grip tightening on her hips, pulling her down as she rolls forward, and she bites harder in response, and the growl that leaves my chest reverberates through us both.

I feel her shiver at the sound of it.

Not from fear—never from fear, not this woman—but from recognition, from the understanding of what that sound means, what she has reduced me to, what she has woken in something that had genuinely forgotten it could be woken. She lifts her head from my shoulder and looks down at me with dark eyes and the marks of my hands on her hips, and she looks like every dangerous thing I have ever wanted and been too careful to reach for.

“Still think I’m going through the motions?” I manage, low against her ear.

She pulls back just enough to glance at me, hair loose around her face, and says, breathless and entirely undefeated, “Ask me again in five minutes.”

I roll us, putting her beneath me in one smooth movement. She laughs, not the guarded version, the real one, short, bright, and startled out of her, and then the laugh dissolves into something else entirely as I brace above her and find my pace. The sound of it, that laugh becoming something rawer and more urgent, is the single finest thing I have heard in centuries of sounds worth hearing.

I move with everything I have been holding back since the first night she walked into my territory and looked at me like I was a problem she intended to solve. Not rushed, I am not rushing this. I refuse to rush this, but deep, certain, and completely without the careful, managed restraint I bring to everything else in my existence. All those years of discipline are set aside, all those years of keeping myself at a precise and deliberate distance from anything that could reach the parts of me I stopped protecting because I stopped believing they existed. She has found every single one of them tonight, and she is not being careful with them, and I do not want her to be.

She arches beneath me, her nails dragging down my back in lines that sting bright and clean and heal almost instantly. I want to tell her not to bother being gentle, that she cannot hurt me, that I want every mark she is willing to leave, and then she drags harder, like she already knows, like she is testing the theory, and the sound I make against her throat confirms it for her.

“More,” she says, low and direct, in the tone she uses when she has assessed a situation and arrived at a conclusion, and I give her more, deeper, harder, the pace shifting into something that has no patience left in it whatsoever. The sound she makes in response cracks open the last quiet room in my chest and floods it with something warm.

Beneath us, the rooftop surface shifts.

Concrete cracks beneath my left hand.

The fracture spreads outward in thin, jagged lines, carving its way across the floor where my grip has sunk in harder than I realized.

I notice it.

In the same way I notice everything else that currently doesn’t matter.

Another crack splinters out beneath my right knee.

The roof groans under us. This building has stood for a long time, but it was never designed to withstand this. Not the force. Not a five-hundred-year-old vampire and a dhampir hunter driving each other right to the edge of what their blood can do.

Concrete fractures, dust shakes loose, and somewhere beneath us, the structure is losing a fight it was never going to win.

I register all of it.

Then immediately stop caring.

Cali feels the surface shift beneath her, and her eyes open, dropping briefly to the crack spreading beneath my hand, and then she looks back up at me with an expression that is equal parts alarm and something that is absolutely, definitively not alarm.