Page 27 of Property of Scar

Chapter Eight

CALYPSO

Three nights ago, this place was hit hard enough to leave it gutted.

No one has touched it since. The damage is still evident with splintered wood, shattered mirrors, and the jukebox cut off mid-song. It reads like a scene that’s been left open on purpose. Burns on the floor where the bodies of vampires have been disposed of.

The Kings own it.

Or what’s left of it.

‘Neutral ground,’ Griggs told me when I pressed him for a location. ‘Club territory, but open. They don’t conduct business there. It’s as close to Switzerland as this city gets.’

I arrived forty minutes early. I always arrive early, because the person who controls the space controls everything that happens in it, and I was not walking into a meeting with Scar in a room he’d had time to read first.

Now I’ve read it.

Every exit—two, front and rear, the rear partially blocked by a collapsed section of wall, but still passable. Three windows, none of them intact, the frames gaping like open mouths above the street. The bar itself provides solid cover if everything goes south faster than anticipated, which, in my experience, is how things tend to go when vampires are involved.

My crossbow is on my back, and both guns are holstered at my thighs. I have four stakes in my vest, two silver-core magazines already seated, my iron hunter’s blade attached to my hip, and the kind of bone-deep alertness that sits just below the skin and makes the air feel thinner.

I’m sitting on the bar.

Because when he arrives, I am not going to be standing in the middle of a room like I’ve been waiting. I am going to be exactly where I chose to be.

The clock on my phone reads 11:59.

The rear door opens at midnight.

On the damn second.

He doesn’t announce himself because he doesn’t have to. I feel him coming before he even steps through the door, that cold, heavy presence rolling ahead of him hard enough for me to recognize it on instinct.

Five centuries carry weight.

Not metaphorical weight. Real weight.

The kind that settles into a room and makes everything in it pay attention, whether it wants to or not. Most vampires feel sharp at the edges—predatory and dangerous—Scar feels ancient. Like standing too close to a storm big enough to flatten buildings and realizing it noticed you back.

He steps into the dark of the bar and stops. Leather cut, dark jeans, heavy boots that make no sound on the grit-covered floor. His eyes find me in the dim without effort, because, of course, they do. He could probably find me in the dark from fifty feet away without trying, and for a moment, neither of us speaks. He takes in the room the same way I did. I can see it in the slight movement of his gaze, reading exits, reading angles, running the same calculation I ran. And then his eyes come back to me, and they stay.

I don’t move.

“You’re on my bar,” he says.

“Your bar got destroyed,” I cut back. “I don’t think it cares.”

Something tightens in his jaw for half a second before it disappears again—a tiny movement that most people wouldn’t catch.

I do.

That’s his version of reacting. Not words or expressions, only that cold stillness he slips into when he’s locking everything down hard enough to keep it from showing. He moves farther into the room, stopping a few feet away from me, and the air between us goes sharp enough to cut.

It has nothing to do with the knives strapped to my body or the stake hidden up my sleeve.

This is something else.

Something electric.