Page 127 of Property of Scar

Something in me snaps.

Not clean.

Definitely not controlled.

Violent.

The sound that tears out of me isn’t human. It isn’t even close. It rips up from somewhere deep and ancient, something that has been held in check for centuries and finally finds a reason to break loose. It echoes out across the frozen expanse, a raw, jagged roar that cracks through the air hard enough to feel like it should split the sky open with it.

I don’t let go of her.

I can’t.

My other hand slams into the ground beside us with everything I’ve got behind it, the impact detonating through the ice in a violent fracture that tears outward in sharp, splintering lines. The surface shatters under the force, cracks racing away from us in every direction as if the ground can’t hold under what’s coming out of me.

It doesn’t help.

Nothing helps.

The rage keeps climbing, feeding on itself, on the absence in my arms, on the fact that she’s gone, and I’m still here to feel it. It burns through me fast and brutal, looking for something to destroy, something to punish for this…

But there’s nothing left.

Nothing to hit.

Nothing to tear apart that fixes this.

That’s what breaks it open wider.

My hand curls into the shattered ice, fingers digging in hard enough to grind the fragments into powder, my body locking around the force of it like I’m holding myself together by violence alone. My fangs are down, my vision narrowed to nothing but white and red and the shape of her in my arms, and for a second, just a second, there’s nothing left of me but the instinct to destroy everything that exists in the same world where she doesn’t.

Then it crashes.

Not gone.

But contained again, forced back down under sheer will, because even now, even like this, I don’t let go of her.

I can’t.

I stay here in the wreckage I just made, holding her against me, the cracks in the ice still spreading outward beneath us, the echo of that roar still hanging in the air like it doesn’t know where to go, and none of it changes anything.

She is still gone.

She is twenty feet away.

And she is dying all over again.

What if you’d gone back sooner?

The thought doesn’t come from outside, it rises from somewhere deep inside me, ugly, ancient, and entirely mine.

What if you had seen it in her before she was too far gone? Before the innocents? Before she made it impossible not to kill her?

The winter field shudders at the edges, Astrid’s shape flickering briefly, her face younger, before the madness had carved lines into it, before her eyes had started holding that vacancy I’d spent months telling myself I wasn’t seeing.

What if I’d loved her enough to look sooner?

The loop resets.