Page 133 of Property of Scar

This is mine.

I pull the blade from my boot and roll it up my wrist, making the cut clean and quick across the inside of my forearm, no hesitation, no wasted motion, just the necessary thing done. Blood wells dark and immediate, heat slipping away from me into the cold morning air.

Scar doesn’t react when I take his hand.

He doesn’t help.

He doesn’t fight.

His weight shifts with mine as I turn his wrist over, exposing the pale line of skin that should give me something back and doesn’t.

“Sorry,” I mutter, more for myself than him.

The blade flashes again, this time across his wrist—controlled, precise, and deep enough to break the surface and nothing more. His blood doesn’t surge the way mine does. It gathers slower, darker, thicker, as if it’s reluctant to move at all.

I don’t wait for more.

I press my forearm to his wrist, forcing the contact, aligning the cuts until our blood meets.

For a second, there’s nothing.

Then it hits.

Not a gradual shift.

Not something I ease into.

It takes me all at once.

The connection snaps into place like something that’s been waiting for this exact moment, something that recognizes itself in the instant our blood touches. It floods through me fast and overwhelming, something that feels less like power and more like alignment, like two things finally locking into the shape they were always meant to hold.

My breath catches on it, no, not breath.

A gasp tears out of me anyway, my head tipping back before I can stop it, my body reacting without permission as that surge rolls through me again, stronger this time, sharper, lighting up every nerve it touches.

It’s too much.

Too fucking good.

The kind of euphoria that doesn’t feel safe, that hits hard enough to make me forget where I am, what I’m doing, why this matters, as if I could stay in it. Like I could drown in it and not care what it costs me.

My grip tightens on him, fingers digging in, grounding myself against the pull of it as it tries to drag me deeper, tries to make this the only thing that matters.

No!

Not now.

I force it back, locking it down hard, dragging myself out of it with more effort than I want to admit, my head snapping forward again as the moment fractures around me and the world slams back into place.

Focus.

“Now,” I tell Roxy, my voice rough, edged with something I haven’t fully shaken. “Open it.”

Her magic floods in around us like a rising tide—warm, amber, carrying a deep, rooted weight only real magic has. I feel it open something in my chest I didn’t know had a door. And then I lean down, pressing my lips to his, and it is nothing like the other times we’ve kissed, no urgency, heat, anger, desire, or uncertainty tangled up in it.

Just me, choosing him, before I know if he’ll choose me back.

The bond takes, the way a fire takes when you finally give it enough kindling, and somewhere underneath everything, underneath the blood, the dawn, the still-collapsing compound, and men behind me holding themselves very carefully still…