Page 129 of Property of Scar

But not close enough.

The distance still stretches between us, as though it’s been set that way on purpose, like no amount of speed I have is ever going to be enough to break it.

Her head snaps in my direction for half a second, something in her focus catching, flickering, and I see her.

Buried under it.

Still there.

And then it’s gone again.

The rampage surges back in, harder this time, the last of it burning through her system in a violent spike that I know exactly how this ends.

I push harder anyway.

I always do.

What if I had never loved her at all? The thought lands like a blade, and I stop moving. In the loop. In whatever place inside my own blood this toxin has dragged me to.

I just stop.

Because that one is new, it is the cruelest variation yet, and it has knocked something loose in the thin, small, fraying part of me that knows this isn’t real.

What if you had never loved her at all?

Then she would have died in someone else’s arms. Or in no one’s. She would have died alone inside what Mordain made her, with no one who knew her before to hold her as she went.

She thanked me.

I have spent centuries using that as proof of how completely I failed her. The sentence that meant she knew what I was doing, that she felt it, that I had driven the blade into the woman I loved while she was coherent enough to recognize my hands, and still she forgave me—the forgiveness itself was the punishment.

That’s what I’ve carried.

That is the cage.

Something shifts beyond the black.

The sensation drags at me from a distance I can’t measure, working its way through the heavy, dreamless weight holding me down. Sound follows in scattered pieces, warped and broken as it forces its way through whatever separates me from the waking world.

There’s stone cracking somewhere. The thunderous collapse of something big enough to shake the ground beneath it. Voices are buried inside the noise, rough, urgent, and achingly familiar. I can’t make out the words or separate one voice from another, but I know the shape of them—my brothers.

The realization settles deep, instinctive and certain.

Something is happening. Something bad. I try to reach for it, but the darkness drags me back before I can get a grip.

Then another sound slips through the cracks. Softer than the rest. Stronger.

A voice I would know whether I was awake, dead, or buried beneath a century of darkness.

Cali.

The name surfaces through the loop. It cuts against the gray winter light of this place like something that belongs to a different country entirely, something warm, alive, and present tense, and the moment it does, the field wavers. Astrid flickers. The frost underfoot cracks along a new fault line, and the fraying part of me that has been whispering ‘this isn’t real’ pulls itself a little taller.

I try to move toward the sound.

Toward that maybe voice somewhere on the other side of the deep water.

But the guilt slams back like a wall.