Page 113 of Property of Scar

Because everything in me has narrowed to a single point, a line drawn straight from him to me that nothing else is allowed to exist inside of. The room’s noise drops away, the fight, the others, all of it pushed back behind something colder and more precise.

Three hundred and fifty years of control doesn’t break.

It locks.

I feel it in the way my jaw sets, my shoulders square without thought, and in the stillness that settles into me so completely it reads as calm from the outside.

It isn’t calm.

It’s pressure.

Held in place.

Built over centuries and forced into shape, every instinct I have is driving in one direction while everything I’ve learned drags it back into line.

He’s watching me.

Waiting to see what gives.

But nothing does.

But something in me shifts anyway, something that has been set in place for a very long time, taking a hit it wasn’t built to absorb.

And instead of breaking…

It holds.

Just barely.

“Did you think her madness was natural?” He spreads his hands slightly, as if the point should already be obvious. “I built it. I perfected it. And you put her down like an animal, never knowing—”

I move before the sentence finishes. Centuries of speed, launches across the chamber in a single explosive burst, every cell of my body locked onto one precise target, his throat, his chest, the fastest route to whatever it would take to make him. Stop. Existing!

He moves the second I commit, not faster than I do, but earlier, like he’s been waiting for the exact point where there’s no pulling the motion back, no correcting the line once it’s set. By the time I realize it, I’m already in it, already closing the distance, already past the moment where instinct can save me from the choice I have made.

He doesn’t rush to meet me, doesn’t need to. He shifts instead, one clean step to the side, controlled and precise, the kind of movement that comes from knowing exactly where I’ll be before I get there. It isn’t reactive or defensive. It’s positioning, like he’s been standing in the right place for this long before I stepped into it.

For a fraction of a second, we’re close enough that everything sharpens, my focus narrowing to the smallest details, the angle of his shoulders, the set of his stance, the expression on his face.

Settled.

Certain.

Like this moment was never in doubt.

His hand moves, and it barely registers at first, just a small shift in his position, nothing dramatic, nothing that should carry any real weight behind it. I’m already driving forward, already committed to the strike, already inside the motion with no intention of pulling it back, and that’s exactly when it happens, when something slips through my guard so cleanly it feels like it was never there to begin with.

There’s no impact, the way there should be, no collision of force against force.

It isn’t a hit.

It is an intrusion.

I don’t see the blade.

I feel it.

It goes in cold, a pressure more than a strike, something sliding into my side with a precision that doesn’t belong in a fight, parting muscle like it knows the exact path it’s meant to take. There’s no hesitation in it, no resistance that matters, just a steady, deliberate push inward that settles deep between my ribs before my body fully catches up to what’s happening.