Page 115 of Property of Scar

Three hundred and fifty years of control, of not making mistakes like this, of not leaving openings like that, and I handed him one.

Clean.

Clear.

Final.

Because he got into my head. I let my guard falter out of anger.

Something darker surges up behind the realization, not clean anger but something deeper, something that wants to tear him apart for daring to touch me, for daring to prove that he could. It pushes hard against everything I’ve built to keep it contained, slamming into that control like a wave hitting a rock, looking for a fracture point to break through.

My jaw locks, the tension running all the way down into my shoulders and spine, every part of me braced, forcing that surge back into line before it can take over the moment.

And underneath it all, there’s something colder.

Not from the blade, but from the realization settling in behind it, clear and undeniable.

This wasn’t luck.

He didn’t find an opening.

He knew exactly where it would be.

Everything else drops away in the same instant.

The room, the others, the fight, all of it receding into nothing as my awareness narrows to that single point of contact, to the foreign presence inside me that shouldn’t exist, that has no right to be there.

And beneath it, cutting through even that, the realization.

This wasn’t chance.

This was his modus operandi all along.

I stop.

The pain registers half a second later. Deep, dark, and spreading, not like a wound but like something dissolving, something working its way inward through pathways that have nothing to do with flesh.

Taking a step back, my hand gripping the handle, I look down.

The blade—ritual-worked, carved from something that has never been simple steel, dark at the edges with dried compound that is already moving through my system like smoke finding gaps in wood.

“A gift,” Mordain says, stepping back, unhurried. He is watching me the way a scientist watches a reaction reach the phase he predicted. “Keyed to your bloodline. Keyed to something considerably more specific than that, in fact.” He pauses. “You’ve carried that guilt for three hundred and fifty years, let it finish the job… rest in peace, Scar.”

Letting out a low, rough growl, my fangs descend as I drive my hand down and rip the blade free. The sound it makes as it leaves my body is wet, something that sticks in the air for a second longer than it should, but whatever was on it doesn’t come out with it.

It’s already inside.

Already moving.

I know this feeling.

The drag of it.

The slow pull toward stillness, toward that heavy, creeping quiet that settles into the body and starts working its way inward, reaching for the edges of consciousness with steady, methodical intent, but this isn’t that.

This is something worse.

This is sharper and faster.