Page 20 of Property of Scar

She doesn’t rush it.

She keeps the stake buried there another second, steady and controlled, making damn sure the thing is finished before she finally lets go. The rogue collapses at her feet and starts caving in on itself the way dead vampires always do, skin tightening over bone while the body sinks inward like something rotten, finally giving up the fight.

The silence that follows lands heavier than the gunshots did.

I’m still standing there halfway through moving in to help, watching her straighten back up like killing two rogues barely got her pulse up.

Huh. Yeah… this woman is a badass.

Her chest rises once, controlled, her gaze flicking over the room again, checking for anything else stupid enough to come at her sideways.

Only then do the guns come back up for a final sweep.

Three seconds.

Then she lowers them to her sides.

Okay, maybe more Lara Croft than superhero, but either way, she’s fucking hot as hell.

The silence that follows is a different kind entirely.

I haven’t moved, standing in the center of a destroyed bar, blood on my hands, on my leather cut, and across the floor between us. She is ten feet away, breathing the kind of breath that comes after a fight rather than during one, the body winding back from its own sharpest edge. Glass catches in her dark hair where she landed through it. A streak of blood cuts across her left cheekbone from a gash that’s already slowing. Her tactical vest is splattered from a kill she made before she came through my roof.

She looks at me like none of this surprised her. Like she already knew I’d be here.

And the way her eyes move over me… not nervous or impressed, simply assessing. It’s like she’s already pulling me apart piece by piece in her head to figure out exactly what I am.

“You’re Scar.” Her voice is flat, stripped of every unnecessary thing. “I’ve heard of you. Five hundred years old and still playing biker gang dress-up.” Something moves in her expression that is not quite a smile, and she tilts her head to the side. “Cute.”

Five centuries have honed my stillness into something most living things interpret as danger. I let her feel it now, let it fill the space between us and settle against whatever composure she is wearing.

“This is my territory, dhampir.” My voice carries nothing that could be called warmth, because I have none to offer her. “You hunt here without permission again… and we will have a problem.”

She tilts her head by a degree that conveys an entire philosophy. “Then I guess we have a problem. Because I’m not asking for permission, vampire.”

Something shifts in the air between us.

Not fear or hostility.

Something… hotter.

It rolls through me sharp and sudden, sparking low under my skin in a way I haven’t felt in a long damn time, especially not in a room littered with bodies she helped put down. Every instinct I’ve got should be focused on the blood, the danger, the fact that she walked into Kings’ territory armed to the teeth and started killing rogues beside me as if she belonged here.

Instead, I’m standing locked into her stare, and she holds it right back without blinking.

No nerves or instinct to look away from the predator in front of her.

There are creatures three times her age that can’t manage that.

She simply holsters both guns in a single, practiced motion and turns toward the door, glass crunching under her boot as she steps over a rogue she didn’t kill but doesn’t bother looking at.

“I know what you are.” The words come out, and I let them land, let them stop her movement even if they don’t turn her. “Half vampire, half human. You think that makes you special?”

She pauses at the threshold. Looks over her shoulder, and the expression on her face is the first fully unguarded thing she’s shown me. “No,” she says. “It makes me better at killing you than anyone else.” Then she steps through the door.

And with vampire speed… she is gone.

I stay standing in the middle of the wrecked bar longer than I should, surrounded by broken glass, blood, and dead rogues, while something under my skin refuses to settle back into place.