Page 103 of Property of Scar

I hold Cali closer, and she feels it, the way she feels most things, and she leans up, looking down at me. “If we die tomorrow—”

“We won’t,” I blurt out.

“Scar.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She weakly smiles. Her expression is measured, clear, and utterly unsentimental. “That’s not how this works.”

“Then we make it work.” The words land without room for argument, because I mean them entirely. Years upon years of knowing how the world operates, and I am choosing, right now, to operate it differently.

She holds my gaze for a long moment. Then, instead of arguing, she reaches into the small pouch at her belt, the one she wears even on rooftops, because she is that kind of woman, and draws out something small. A bracelet, hand-plaited from dark cord, two strands of something luminous woven through the center, subtle and barely catching the starlight.

She holds it out on her palm. “It’s from my father’s lineage,” she says, and her voice has gone different, the way it gets when she’s touching something she doesn’t let herself touch often. “Dhampir heritage. It doesn’t make you human, nothing does that. But it filters the UV and lets your body process the light differently.” She meets my eyes. “You could walk in the daylight. Not forever. Not without limit. But enough.”

I look at the bracelet for a long moment and say nothing, because the right words are not yet assembled, and I am not in the habit of saying wrong ones for the sake of filling silence.

She’s offering me a piece of her bloodline. A piece of what she is, that double-natured inheritance she’s spent her whole life navigating, and she’s wrapping it around something that can protect me and handing it over the night before we walk into the most dangerous thing either of us has done.

I reach out and take it from her palm, carefully, and she reaches over and ties it at my wrist, fingers sure and steady, the same hands that stake rogues and reload under fire and apparently keep small sacred things in belt pouches for the right moment.

“Thank you,” I say, and the words come out stripped of everything except what they mean.

She nods once, looking at it against my wrist.

Something moves in my chest, and the feeling hits so deep it’s uncomfortable. I’ve spent years learning exactly which parts of myself to lock down and which ones to trust. I’d been operating under the assumption that this particular part was long dead.

Turns out I was wrong.

If my heart still beat, it’d be making a hell of a lot of noise right now, and I’m too old to pretend I don’t know exactly why.

But I set it aside for now.

I pull her back in, hold her, and the stars keep their watch above us both.

Tomorrow, we go into the dark.

But tonight, tonight I hold her, and I finally let go of the guilt I have been carrying.

Because Cali…

Is worth moving past it for.

Chapter Twenty-Four

SCAR

The Next Morning

Dawn reaches the tunnel in thin gray strips through the grating overhead.

It isn’t enough to chase out the dark, but it is enough to give it shape. The air down here tastes like putrid water, rust, and old decay. Every breath carries something heavier underneath, something I can’t quite name but don’t particularly trust.

Not that I’d trust this place even without it.

I’ve spent centuries crawling through tunnels, sewers, catacombs, and buried passageways, and I have yet to find one that didn’t feel like the beginning of a bad damn decision.

“Clear to the next junction,” Flux says from somewhere ahead, his voice carrying back through the dark without the benefit of a body. He has shifted into something lean and low to the ground, built for moving through tight spaces without being seen, and whatever form he’s chosen, it’s barely a shape in the gloom ahead of us, more a suggestion than anything solid. A small device attaches itself to the tunnel wall and goes dark, a trap disabled.