Page 149 of Property of Scar

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I want to.” His jaw works once, like he’s deciding where to start, or maybe just giving himself permission to. “Cassian,” he says. “Cassian Visconti.”

The name sits strangely in the room, old, formal, and entirely unlike the man standing in front of me. Yet, I can see it, underneath everything else, the ghost of some five-hundred-year-old man who learned to survive on charm and usefulness because nothing was ever going to be handed to him.

“Milan,” he adds. “Before the fangs. Before any of this was mine to carry, I was twenty-one when a vampire lord offered me the world. I was the youngest son of a nobleman, my two elder brothers treated me like shit, and I hated being the son who was the weak one… so an offer of strength and immortality… who could give that up?”

I don’t reach for it lightly. I can feel what it costs him just to let the syllables out into the air. “Cassian,” I repeat, testing the shape of it, and something in his expression shifts at hearing it in my mouth.

“I haven’t said it out loud since Astrid,” he admits. “She was the last person to call me that. I didn’t think I’d ever want to hear it again.”

“And now?”

“Now it doesn’t feel like something I’m giving up,” he says. “It feels like something I get to have again.”

The weight of that settles into my chest, and I know, with the same certainty the bond keeps humming into my blood, that I’m not going to let this be one-sided. He just handed me three and a half centuries of silence like it was nothing. It was not nothing, and I am not a woman who takes without giving something back.

“I haven’t said my mother’s name out loud since the night she died,” I tell him. “Twelve years old, and I just… stopped saying it. Like if I kept it locked up somewhere it couldn’t hurt as much.” My throat tightens around it anyway, even now. “Elena.” It’s barely more than a breath, but it’s out, hanging in the space between us, mine to have kept and his now too.

“Elena,” Scar says, careful with it, the way you’re careful with something you understand is fragile and precious in equal measure.

“She had a garden with too many tomatoes,” I say, and my voice wobbles despite my best efforts. “And she laughed too loud at her own jokes.”

Scar’s hand finds my jaw, thumb brushing along my cheekbone, and he doesn’t say anything else because he doesn’t need to. He holds the name the way I held his, like it matters, because it does.

And just like that, the decision is made.

From outside the door, with absolutely zero delay, as if they were pressed against it with their ears flat, we hear the brothers rally.

“About damn time!” Ruckus calls from down the hall.

“Pay up, feathers! I called it!” Carnage yells at full volume, like he’s been waiting months to cash in on this.

“You called it three weeks ago… that doesn’t count!” Sentinel drones, equally as loud, which is alarming from an angel.

Scar shuts his eyes for two seconds. Long enough to communicate an impressive amount of affection and irritation at the same time. Then he stalks to the door and throws it open.

The hallway immediately goes to shit. Boots pound against timber, bodies scramble. A fully grown supernatural biker nearly wipes out trying to escape.

Apparently, half the clubhouse had been listening at the door and is now performing the world’s least convincing impression of people who were definitely somewhere else the entire time.

Ruckus has already rounded a corner. Wreck, who should know better, is somehow halfway down the stairs. Even Coil, whom I have never seen move with anything other than measured calm, is drifting toward the far end of the hallway with studied nonchalance.

Two people are not moving.

Carnage, hellfire eyes burning with shameless delight, like self-preservation never made the cut, stands in the middle of the hallway with his arms crossed and his chin up, grinning like he won something, because he did.

Sentinel stands beside him with his wings folded and his expression composed in that way he has, serene, celestial, and completely unbothered, as if this is simply where he decided to be.

Scar looks at them both.

“You two stayed?”

Carnage shrugs, his grin not dimming by a fraction. “We’re idiots.”

Sentinel’s expression doesn’t change, but I can practically see the gears turning. “Consistent idiots.”

Something moves across Scar’s face. Not softness, exactly, this is a five-hundred-year-old vampire, not a golden retriever, but something warm underneath the careful control, something that surfaces and holds before he clears it. “Get out of here. Both of you.”