Page 148 of Property of Scar

There isn’t one.

I know I’m not leaving.

The bond hums it into my bloodstream with every beat, an answer to a question I haven’t fully asked out loud yet.

But I’m standing here anyway, because there’s a difference between knowing something and deciding it. I am a woman who has spent her entire adult life making deliberate choices with both hands open, fully aware of the cost.

The cost of this one is considerable.

I think about the life I carried into this territory. Lean, solitary, purposeful. A bag full of weapons, a head full of hunter’s protocols, a bone-deep certainty that I would never end up like my mother, who loved a vampire and paid for it in the most permanent way possible. Twelve years old, standing in the dark, learning in a single terrible moment what it meant to let something supernatural all the way in.

I swore I wouldn’t.

Not ever.

And then I crashed through a skylight into the Kings of Anarchy’s pub. Scar looked at me with those red eyes that had five centuries of damage behind them, and I spent the next several weeks being completely insufferable about how little I was affected.

The bond shifts in my chest, warm and faintly amused, and I breathe it out through my nose.

Yeah, I know.

I don’t hear him. I never hear him. He moves like the dark moves, without sound or warning, but the bond registers him a half second before my eyes do, a pull low in my tummy that says there he is, and I turn without meaning to.

Scar stands in the threshold, shoulder against the frame, watching me.

He isn’t desperate. He isn’t raw or undone the way he looked in the sleeping cage when I pulled him back from the inside of centuries of guilt.

He’s just… here.

Settled into his own skin in a way that still catches me off guard, this man who spent so much time making a home inside his damage and has only recently decided to put something else there instead.

Me.

The absence of the scar on his face catches the amber light of the lamp, and something in my throat tightens around it.

He looks at me the way he’s been looking at me since the patching ceremony, like he’s already made his decision, and he’s been patient enough to wait for me to make mine.

“Stay.” His voice is low, no theater or performance in it, just the word, stripped to its bones. “Be part of this family. Be mine. Be my Old Lady.”

My chin lifts with an old reflex. “I’m not property.”

“No.” He doesn’t miss a beat, and his eyes don’t move from mine. “You’re the person I choose. Every fucking day… if you’ll have me.” Something shifts in his jaw and tightens, as if the words cost him something, but he’s paying it willingly. “I love you, Calypso.”

I feel it land in my chest the way the bond landed, not like something foreign, but like something that was always going to be there, waiting for us both to catch up to it.

My mother loved a vampire, and it destroyed her.

But my mother loved a vampire who left. Who never looked at her the way this one is looking at me right now, like I’m the most real thing in a life full of ghosts, grief, and the heavy labor of surviving things that should have broken him.

“I love you too… so fucking much,” I say.

For a moment, neither of us says anything else. The bond hums low and steady between us, and I let myself stand inside it, in the amber light, in the fact of him having said the words out loud.

Then something else occurs to me. Something I want before the brothers inevitably ruin this. “What was your name?” I ask. “Before Scar. Before any of this.”

He goes very still. Not the careful, controlled stillness he wears like a second skin. This is different. Like I’ve asked something he never expected to hear, and whatever answer exists isn’t sitting where he can reach it.

“No one has asked me that in a very long time,” he says finally.