Page 134 of Property of Scar

I feel something reach back.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

SCAR

The loop begins again.

Astrid is twenty feet away, and she is dying, the same way she has been dying since the moment the toxin dragged me under, the same pale light, the same frost splitting under my boots, the same pull in my chest that never stops feeling like the first time.

I know this.

I know what comes next.

I know every beat of it the way you know a nightmare you’ve had so many times it has started to feel like a room you live in.

And then…

Something shifts.

It arrives like a crack in the dark, small at first, and then impossible to ignore. The feeling cuts straight through the guilt that’s been sitting on my chest for so long, I’ve stopped noticing its weight.

Warmth follows. Not much, but just enough to feel foreign. Just enough to feel real.

Nothing in this place has felt real in a very long time.

And for the first time since I got trapped here, I find myself reaching toward it instead of the dark.

Warm.

Not the memory of warmth.

Not the echo of it.

Real, present, living warmth, pressing through the walls of this place as if they have no more authority than paper. My bloodstream recognizes it before my mind catches up, something ancient in my vampiric nature sitting up hard, fast, and certain, the way an animal recognizes its own.

Cali.

The name surfaces through the loop, and the whole thing starts coming apart. Ice cracks beneath my boots and frost splinters across the frozen ground. Astrid flickers and distorts at the edge of my vision.

But the warmth doesn’t.

It stays exactly where it is.

It doesn’t tell me I’m forgiven or tell me I’m a good man.

Christ knows neither of those things would work on me anyway.

It just sits there in my chest, solid and immovable, refusing to leave.

The way Cali always does.

Her human half bleeds through in a way my fully vampiric system has never been able to replicate, something alive, warmth that comes from a pulse, from blood that moves because a heart is pushing it, from a body that was never built for darkness the way mine was. But underneath that, threaded through it, her vampire half speaks directly to mine in a register that bypasses language entirely, the way bloodlines recognize each other across centuries without needing words to do it.

She is not asking me to come back.

She is simply here, inside my blood, and the sheer weight of it makes the cage walls shudder.

Astrid flickers again, her shape losing its edges, the pale winter light pulling thinner, and that’s when Mordain’s last words rise through the deep water, not filtered by fog this time, not distorted by distance, but clean and absolute, landing in the stillness with everything they were always carrying.