Page 33 of Property of Scar

It’s the look of a predator deciding whether the thing standing in front of him is about to become an ally, a problem, or a goddamn body.

Cali meets Raze’s stare head-on, steady as stone beneath the weight of it. Her posture stays controlled, every movement deliberate, while she watches him with the same sharp focus he’s giving her. Most people crumble under that kind of attention from a dragon. Their instincts start talking before their mouths do. Cali just stands there like she was built to survive predators. She stands there and looks right back at him as if she’s weighing him up too.

And that, that changes the feel of the room.

The tension rolls outward through the clubhouse because every brother here understands exactly what it means to stare down something like Raze without flinching.

Ruckus lets out a low breath, more impressed than he wants to be.

Coil’s phone call goes briefly, noticeably quiet.

Even Wreck lifts his head, and when a wendigo recalibrates his read of something, the air in the room changes temperature.

“She’s got nerve,” Raze says finally. Not a compliment, not quite a condemnation, but definitely an observation, delivered like steel.

“She’ll need it,” Wreck says from the corner, his voice arriving like sound from the bottom of something deep. His gaunt face remains expressionless, every hollow plane giving nothing away, but his eyes haven’t left Cali since the moment she walked in. “If Mordain’s rebuilding… nerve won’t be enough.”

I feel it in the subtle charge in the air around her, the way Roxy’s magic threads through the room, steady and unmistakable in the way it wasn’t two months ago. “The dark energy she’s describing… I can sense its traces. Someone mixing vampire and berserker blood, their idea isn’t just to create rogues.” Her eyes find mine, and in them is the same understanding that’s been living in my chest since Cali first laid out the research. “It’s to create something none of us can contain alone.”

Raze looks at her for a long moment. Something passes across his face, a softening so brief most would miss it, a quiet shift as he decides her instincts are worth more than his own skepticism, then he looks back at Cali.

And the warmth is entirely gone.

“You’re here on Scar’s word,” he states, and there is no ambiguity in it, no room for misinterpretation, no version of this statement that is anything other than what it is. “Betray us… and I’ll kill you myself.”

Cali holds his gaze without any visible effort. “Fair call.”

Something in my chest releases a fraction. I hadn’t realized how much was riding on those two words until she said them.

The clubhouse settles back into motion, the tension easing just enough for everyone to slip back into business.

Coil turns back to his phone call like the interruption never happened, his voice dropping into that calm, dangerous smoothness he uses when he’s about to bleed somebody dry in a negotiation.

Near the office, Maul reappears carrying a stack of fight rosters under one arm, already barking updates before he’s fully crossed the room. He handles paperwork the same way he handles everything else—fast, blunt, and with an attitude that suggests he’s personally offended by the existence of administrative tasks in the first place.

Across the clubhouse, Wreck lowers himself back over Bennett and picks the tattoo gun up again. The buzz fills the room a second later, like the whole place just decided Cali surviving Raze’s attention wasn’t enough reason to stop the night rolling forward.

Roxy touches Cali’s elbow, drawing her a small step aside, her expression open in a way that isn’t naivety, it’s the warmth of having come into this world as an outsider herself and not forgetting what it felt like. I watch her say something low, watching Cali’s expression flicker with something she doesn’t mean to show. Surprise, maybe. The kind that comes from encountering more than you braced for.

Roxy looks human enough at first glance, small beside the monsters filling this clubhouse, but anybody paying attention figures out real damn quick that she’s one of the most dangerous people in the room.

Maybe the most dangerous besides Raze.

I catch the exact moment Cali realizes it too.

Something shifts in her posture, easy to miss if you aren’t watching for it. The hard edge she walked in carrying eases back just enough to matter, her shoulders loosening while she answers Roxy in a voice that still carries steel, just not quite as much armor as before.

I notice that shit immediately.

From the far end of the room, Rhett’s voice drifts over, “So she hunts vampires. Does that make Scar her type or her target?”

“That’s inappropriate,” Bennett groans.

“That’s not a no.”

“I’m not dignifying that with a response.”

“Because you agree with me.”