Page 136 of Property of Scar

Only her.

Some instinct I don’t have words for locks onto that truth and doesn’t let go, the pull sharpening into something more than direction or awareness, but something that feels inevitable.

Like I was always meant to follow it.

Like wherever it leads is where I’m supposed to be.

The guilt doesn’t disappear. I don’t get absolution. What I get is a decision point, the first real one I’ve been offered, and it comes down to this—she is more real than the past. She is present tense, enduring, and she has woven herself into the biology of me before she even knew if I would choose her back, and that kind of courage deserves to be met.

Living is not a betrayal of Astrid.

She would want me to know that.

I pull in a breath, an old human reflex from a life centuries buried, instinct that survives the way she survives, changed, quieter, but still present.

And I reach back.

Not with reservation. Not with a careful, half-committed reach, like some part of me is still trying to hold me under. I reach with everything I have left, toward the warmth Cali is giving my blood, toward the thread of her that has made itself at home in my bloodstream, toward the door she has held open at a cost I haven’t yet seen and already know was enormous.

Toward living.

Toward Cali.

Chapter Thirty

CALYPSO

Scar’s chest jerks beneath my hand. For one terrible second, I think I’ve imagined it, that exhaustion and desperation have finally pushed me over the edge.

Then a rough breath tears out of him. The sound hits me so hard my own lungs forget how to work. Another breath follows, uneven and ragged, his body dragging air back into itself after far too long without it.

I stare at him, afraid to move or speak, afraid that if I do, whatever impossible thing is happening will disappear.

“Scar?” His name leaves me as little more than a whisper.

His fingers twitch against the dirt. The movement is small, barely noticeable. It still feels like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. Relief crashes into me so suddenly that it almost hurts, sharp enough to leave my eyes burning. His jaw tightens, and a muscle jumps beneath his skin.

Then, his eyelids flicker. My pulse trips over itself, and I find myself leaning closer, one hand tangled in the front of his club cut, the other pressed against his chest as though I need the constant reminder that he’s really here.

“Come on,” I whisper. I don’t know whether I’m talking to him or myself.

“Come on, Scar!”

His eyes slowly open. Not fully at first, just enough for me to catch the confusion there as his gaze drifts across the clearing. The sun has started creeping over the horizon, pale light spilling across broken earth, shattered stone, and the wreckage left behind by the fight.

His eyes move over all of it without settling.

Fear coils low in my stomach.

What if he’s still trapped somewhere inside his own head?

What if I got him back only to lose him again?

The thoughts barely form before his gaze shifts.

His eyes find mine, and everything inside me stops. The world, the battle, the exhaustion, the pain, all of it falls away beneath the simple, impossible fact that he’s looking at me.

His gaze finds mine, and the whole world narrows to that.