Page 14 of Property of Scar

Fucking goblin!

Always digging a thumb into the bruise to see if you flinch.

I pull out my phone and lay it flat on the counter between us, the photograph of the ritual scars from the rogue’s torso bright against the darkened shop. I watch his face instead of the screen, because that’s where the real information lives.

For a moment, he doesn’t react. The slow, considering blink, along with the faint tilt of his head as he takes in the image, but then… something changes. It moves through him like a cold current pulled under the surface, a tightening across his brow, a stillness in those oil-dark eyes that has nothing to do with composure and everything to do with recognition. The color that drains from Griggs’ face isn’t dramatic. It’s quiet, and that makes it worse.

Not the theatrical kind, the real kind, the involuntary one that happens when a body registers a threat faster than the mind can catch up to it.

He pushes the phone back toward me with one short, wide finger, like he doesn’t want it near him a second longer than necessary.

“Where in Satan’s scrap heap did you find this?” His voice comes out lower than before.

“Rogue vampire,” I tell him. “Third one this month carrying the same marks. Carved, not healed over. Deliberate.”

He says nothing for a long moment. “Crimson Circle.”

The words land in the space between us and sit there, heavy and still.

“Thought they were extinct,” he adds, almost to himself.

I lean in slightly. “Tell me.”

He doesn’t want to. I can see it in the way his hands settle flat on the counter, the way he glances toward the back of the shop once before he starts, like he’s checking the exits out of pure reflex. “An ancient cult,” he says finally, his voice flattening out like he’s reading off a list he regrets memorizing. “Vampire in origin. Older than most bloodlines still standing. The kind of old that should’ve stayed buried and nailed shut.”

He makes a face, small but definite. “They were obsessed with what they called perfection. Decided the vampire line had gone soft and diluted. Started talking about rebuilding it from the ground up… like that ever ends well.” He stops, then adds, “Spoiler… it doesn’t!”

He pauses, and I let the silence sit, because pushing Griggs never gets you anywhere useful. “They experimented,” he continues, and there’s a faint shift in his expression like he’s already regretting opening this drawer. “Mixed vampire blood with other supernatural lines. Trying to build something that carried the best of everything and none of the weaknesses. Real ‘let’s fix what isn’t broken and see how badly it goes’ kind of thinking.”

He gestures vaguely, like he’s flicking through a list he’d rather not have memorized. “Fae, lycan, elemental. If it had power, they poured it in and hoped it didn’t explode.” His wide mouth compresses, the humor thinning out. “But it was the berserkers that really caught their interest with their rage and endurance. The way that blood doesn’t like being told what it is.”

He exhales softly through his nose. “Berserker blood fights back. Against spells and control. Against anything that tries to cage it.” He shakes his head, like he’s trying to dislodge the thought entirely. “Most of the test subjects didn’t survive,” he says, quieter now. “And the ones that did—”

He stops there and doesn’t finish whatever terrible thought entered his Goblin mind.

The silence that follows isn’t empty. It sits heavy, like whatever he could say next would only make it worse.

After a beat, he huffs out a breath, dragging himself back to the point. “The vampire lords at the time decided they’d seen enough. Three hundred years ago, a coalition of them went in and burned the Circle down to the foundations.” He tilts his head slightly, mouth pulling to one side. “Or so history says.”

My jaw is tight. I can feel it, the clench across bone that happens when something I already half knew solidifies into certainty. “But?”

“But the scars are here,” Griggs says, and his eyes find mine, flat, serious, and stripped of his usual mercenary detachment. “Which means either someone found the old texts and decided to try again, or the Circle was never as finished as everyone wanted to believe.”

The quiet that follows isn’t comfortable.

I pick up my phone, and I’m not looking at the photograph anymore. I’m looking through it, past it, past the rogue’s carved torso, the dark alley, and the clean edge of the body burning down to nothing. I’m looking at a kitchen table with a candle burning low, and my mother’s voice, the way everything that was ordinary and whole in the world stopped being those things in the space of one night when I was twelve years old.

A cult took her.

Not the Crimson Circle, a different name, a different obsession, but the same type of belief… that something sacred lived in blood, that the right ritual could extract it, and that the cost of the extraction was someone else’s problem.

She was human, mostly.

She was kind.

She had a garden with too many tomatoes, laughed too loudly at her own jokes, and she loved me in the uncomplicated way you don’t fully understand until it’s gone.

They didn’t know she had a daughter.