Page 101 of Property of Scar

“Are we breaking the roof?” she asks, breathless, her voice two registers lower than usual.

“Appears so,” I say, but I don’t stop.

“Scar—”

“The roof will survive,” I tell her, dropping my mouth to her throat, finding her pulse with my lips, and staying there. “Probably.”

“Probably…” Whatever she was going to follow that with dissolves as I change the angle. Her head goes back, and her hands find my shoulders and grip hard enough that I feel the pressure even through what I am, and I decide that is the finest sentence she has ever left unfinished.

The cracks spread in a slow, deliberate map beneath us, the concrete whispering apart under the sustained pressure, small pieces of the parapet edge crumbling loose and dropping into the dark below, and I feel the surface flex beneath my palms. Still, I do not stop, I do not slow, because this is a life only partially lived over centuries, finally demanding to be felt in full, and the roof is going to have to manage.

I feel it building in her before she does. The subtle shift in her breathing first, the rhythm she has been riding breaking apart into something shorter and less controlled, each exhale catching on the inhale before it has fully finished, her chest rising in uneven pulls that tell me her body has stopped taking instruction from the composed, tactical part of her brain and started running entirely on something older and more honest. Her hands, which have been moving with purpose all night, lose their direction, fingers spread across my shoulders, gripping, releasing, gripping again, sliding over muscle and skin as she tries to find something solid to anchor herself against.

Then her hips…

The roll of them changes, becomes less deliberate and more desperate, chasing rather than meeting, her body angling itself instinctively toward where it needs me most. I adjust without being asked because I have been paying attention to every signal she has given me all night, and I know exactly what she needs. I give it to her, deeper, the angle precise, and the sound she makes confirms I have it right before her brain has finished registering the change.

Her thighs begin to tremble against my hips, but it’s not weakness. Her legs are extraordinary. She could crack ribs with them, and she knows it, but the trembling of muscle held at the very limit of its tension, shaking under the sustained strain of being close to the edge for this long. I feel it against my skin like a vibration, like something wound so tight it is beginning to sing.

“Scar.” My name, fragmented, barely assembled.

“I’ve got you,” I tell her, low and certain, against her temple, and I mean it in ways that extend considerably beyond this rooftop and this moment, and I think she knows that, because her exhale in response to it is not steady.

Her back arches off the cracked concrete beneath us, her spine curving in a long, involuntary line that presses every inch of her against me, and I feel her whole body tighten, a full clench, every muscle contracting at once, her breath stopping entirely for two seconds that feel suspended outside of time, and then she comes apart.

The second time, with my name on her lips, her thighs locked around me, and her nails leaving marks that I will have healed before dawn and will grieve the loss of before the hour is out. But what I feel from her is not simply the physical. It is the totality of it, the full force of every carefully maintained barrier finally gone. Every layer of competent and controlled and professionally distant has been stripped away, and the version of her that exists underneath all of that armor is finally fully present in my hands. It is the most devastating thing I have ever been trusted with.

I feel it move through her in waves, the first crest sharp and overwhelming, her entire body shuddering against mine. A broken sound leaving her that she will never produce in front of another living soul. Then the long, rolling aftershocks that follow, each one pulling another sound from her throat, her grip on me tightening and releasing in rhythm with them, her face pressed into my neck with the unguarded urgency of someone who has forgotten to be careful.

It moves through me, too, through my hands where they grip her hips, through my chest where it hits something deep and long-dormant and knocks it permanently sideways, because feeling her like this, feeling her trust me with this version of herself, the undefended one, the one that exists beneath the hunter, the competence and the careful professional distance, that is not nothing… that is no small thing. That is the most significant thing that has happened inside my chest in three hundred and fifty years, and I feel it with the full and staggering weight of every one of those years behind it.

Just Cali, undone, present, and mine.

It starts at the base of my spine and moves upward through every dead and quiet place in me that her blood, warmth, and the sheer fact of her have been slowly reawakening all night. When it crests, it is not the cold, mechanical release of a body performing a function. It is something that has feeling behind it, real feeling, the kind that belongs to a living thing rather than an ancient thing merely persisting. It moves through me in a wave that I have no control over and no desire to regain. The sound that comes with it is wrecked, low, and entirely genuine, pressed into the curve of her neck. For one suspended, wordless, structureless moment, there is nothing in existence—no club, no assault, no centuries of weight, no Mordain, no tomorrow—nothing except this rooftop, this woman, the stars holding their vigil above us, and the concrete fractured beneath us like even the building had to give something up to contain what just happened here.

I explode inside her like a dam breaking, every carefully maintained boundary between what I allow myself to feel and what I have been keeping behind glass for centuries shattering all at once. If I could breathe, I would be gasping. The sensation moves through me like a physical force, every inch of my body vibrating with something that is not quite adrenaline but is the closest thing my blood has to it. The aftershocks roll through me in waves that do not diminish quickly, that rattle through my chest, my hands, and the place behind my chest where something has been quietly, irrevocably rearranged tonight.

A heavy, deep, guttural growl escapes me that shocks even my ears. “Fuck.” I hiss, pressed into the curve of her throat, stripped of everything except what it means, which is, I was not prepared for this. Not for her, and certainly not for what it feels like to stop managing the distance between wanting something and allowing myself to have it.

The admission should sit badly with me.

Instead, I find I don’t care.

She’s already seen the things I’ve spent centuries hiding. The scars, grief, and the parts of myself I was certain would stay locked away forever.

This is just one more room I thought I’d sealed shut.

And somehow, she’s walked into it anyway.

I feel her chest move beneath me, the small, quick exhale of a laugh, soft and private, not the sharp, bright one from earlier, but something quieter, warmer, and more dangerous for it.

“Five hundred years…” she says, her voice rough at the edges, “… and ‘fuck’ is all you can say?”

“Give me a moment…” I murmur against her throat, “… to locate the rest of my vocabulary.”

She laughs again, properly this time, and the sound of it reverberates through me in the aftermath of everything, warm and real. I decide it is the finest sound I have ever heard, and I intend to spend a considerable portion of the next five centuries finding reasons to hear it again.

I stay where I am, my weight settled against her, my face resting at her throat, her hands moving slowly through my hair now, different from before, not gripping or demanding, just present, just tracing, the way you touch something you are deciding to keep.