Page 3 of Property of Scar

Not the sound…

The urge.

I step in.

There’s no hesitation left in the movement, no space for him to react in any meaningful way. My fist drives into the back of his skull with a force that snaps his head forward, the impact jolting up my arm, real in a way the hunger isn’t.

My other hand follows immediately, locking onto his jaw, controlling the angle before instinct can even attempt to compensate.

The world narrows to contact.

Grip.

Control.

Rotation.

The neck gives with a deep, heavy crack that I feel travel through my hands and settle somewhere solid in my chest. His body drops in the same instant, all that mass collapsing into dead weight before the sound fully catches up, hitting the concrete hard enough to echo through the pit.

For a single, suspended breath, the chant breaks.

Then the room detonates.

“SCAR!”

The name isn’t a chant anymore. It is a deafening roar, and it tears through the space, bodies slamming into the cage hard enough that the links strain under the force, hands reaching through as if they could drag me back into the center and demand more. The energy is feral and alive, feeding on the finality of what just happened.

I step back from the dead body, the fight already finished long before most of them understand how it ended.

My knuckles are split open, skin torn and bleeding freely, the blood slick across my hands already beginning to cool in the underground air. Some of it belongs to him, but most of it doesn’t.

My chest rises and falls in a slow, controlled rhythm that never quite matches the chaos around me.

My shirt hangs in torn strips, soaked through and clinging to skin that’s already repairing itself beneath the surface. The ache in my rib pulses dull and steady, the slow pull of healing threading through bone and muscle, grounding me in something physical, something real.

A towel is shoved through the chain-link, and I take it without looking, pressing it against my hands, watching the way the blood smears rather than stops. Around me, the crowd keeps feeding the moment, the echoes of my name still rolling through them in uneven bursts, like they can’t quite let it go.

And I stand in the center of it, untouched in any way that matters, letting the noise wash over me without ever quite reaching where it counts.

Because the fight is over.

And I’m still here.

Waiting for the next one.

“That’s our Scar.” Ruckus grins from the edge of the betting table, his leprechaun luck still glowing faintly around his hands from whatever odds manipulation he’s been running tonight. “Still got it, old man.”

I don’t dignify that with a response.

From somewhere to my right, Rhett’s voice carries over the noise without effort, loud in that unapologetic way he’s worn his whole life. “Bet you fifty bucks Scar didn’t even break a sweat.”

Bennett doesn’t look up from the knife he’s running a cloth over, which he has absolutely no reason to be cleaning right now. “I don’t gamble with hellspawn. Your kind cheats.”

“Rich…” Rhett says, entirely unbothered, “… coming from someone whose entire deal is divine intervention. That’s just cheating, but with better PR.”

I wipe blood from my knuckles with more focus than the task requires. “Both of you, shut it. Some of us are trying to bleed in peace.”

They fall quiet, not for lack of thought, but because neither of them is ready to put it into words.