Page 145 of Property of Scar

My eyes dart to Cali, and she softly smiles at me, like she is confirming their words.

“And you saw it too,” Bennett adds.

I let that sit just long enough to feel it start digging in, then I shake my head once, dragging a hand through my hair.

“What the fuck is this?” I mutter. “Group therapy?”

Rhett snorts immediately. “Don’t flatter yourself,” he shoots back. “You’re not paying us enough for that.”

Bennett doesn’t even blink. “If we were your therapists…” he says mildly, “… this would have happened about three hundred and fifty years ago.”

That earns a short, rough huff of a laugh out of me despite myself.

I look at both of them for a long moment. “Don’t let it go to your heads,” I say, but my voice doesn’t carry the weight I usually put behind it, and we all know it.

Rhett grins anyway, wide, bright, and utterly unrepentant. “Too late.”

“All right, enough of the bullshit, everyone shut up!” Raze takes his place at the front of the room, and the shift is immediate. Voices taper off. Chairs stop moving. Every eye turns his way.

Some men spend their entire lives trying to command a room, but Raze has never seemed to notice he’s doing it.

“Rhett. Bennett. Step up.”

They do.

And something in the room shifts.

Raze lets the silence hold for a breath before he speaks, and when he does, his voice carries the full weight of a president who has watched both of these men bleed, rise, and choose this family over and over again.

“There are two kinds of people who walk into this club,” he begins, his gaze moving between them with steady, unsparing regard. “People who want what we can give them, and people who want to be part of what we are…” He pauses. “You two have never once made me question which kind you are.”

He looks at Rhett first, and the room seems to lean in with him. “When you came to us, you were all hellfire and teeth. All instinct. You’d burn a path through anything that moved without stopping to ask if you needed to.” The corner of his mouth shifts, barely perceptible. “You still will. But somewhere between the dock and the compound and every bloody mile in between, you learned something most hellhounds never do. You learned when to burn and when to stand still. You took a blade meant for your brother, and you didn’t flinch, didn’t calculate, just moved.” He holds the moment there. “You’ve never fought for yourself. Not once, in all of it. You fight for whoever’s standing beside you. That’s not a hellhound. That’s a king.”

Rhett’s jaw works. The hellfire in his eyes gutters low for a second, not out, just deeper, burning somewhere more interior than usual. He doesn’t speak. He can’t. And that, from Rhett, says more than any words could manage.

Raze turns to Bennett, and the shift is subtle, something in the register of his voice that carries a different kind of weight.

“Bennett… you came in carrying heaven on your back like a debt you could never pay down. Every move justified, every call squared against something higher than the room you were standing in.” He tilts his head. “That’s not gone. Don’t lose it… we need it. But somewhere you stopped using divine judgment to keep yourself apart from this and started using it to protect what’s in it.”

His gaze doesn’t waver. “In the compound, when the tunnel came down, you didn’t think. You didn’t weigh consequence, outcome, or whether it was ordained. You threw yourself between your brother and the dark because it was right. Not because it was written anywhere. Because you decided it was…” He pauses. “That’s the hardest thing an angel can learn, and you did it without anyone having to teach you.”

Bennett stands beside Rhett, looking calm as ever. That’s the thing about angels. They can be falling apart and still look like they’ve got their shit together. But I catch the slight movement in his throat. The tiny dip of his chin. The brief pulse of gold beneath his skin.

Small things. Easy to miss, but not if you know where to look.

I study them from where I stand, and something moves through me like the tide turning, the reckoning of centuries looking at what these two men have become inside this club, inside my watch, and understanding that whatever they arrived as, what’s standing in this room now is something I had a hand in shaping.

That lands somewhere in my chest, close to pride.

Fuck it! It is pride.

Raze reaches for their patches.

The full cuts. Kings of Anarchy insignia. Front and back. The top rocker. The bottom rocker. The center patch means you are no longer someone on the outside looking in. You are the inside, you are the thing other people are kept away from, you are claimed and claiming in equal measure.

“Rhett, Bennett…” Raze’s voice fills the room, and the room holds it. “You’ve proven yourselves. You stood in fire and shadow, and you didn’t break. You bled for this club, you bled for each other, and you did it without being asked.” He stalls, deliberate, the kind that lands in the center of your chest. “Welcome to the Kings of Anarchy.”

Everyone cheers, but Raze holds up his hand to halt us. “One more thing.” He holds each of them in his gaze in turn. “Every man in this room earned a name. Not the one they were born with, the one this club gave them. The one that says what they are when everything else is stripped away.”