Page 36 of Property of Scar

Just… something.

Then Ruckus’ beer disappears. One second, it’s sitting in front of him, the next it simply isn’t there. He stares at the empty space like he’s been personally wronged, and across the table, Flux lifts his glass, serene and entirely uninvolved, or at least pretending to be. Ruckus reaches for a fresh one, and it disappears before his hand closes around it. He turns slowly toward Flux, whose expression doesn’t shift a single inch. Five seconds later, an Irish tune starts playing from Ruckus’ phone in his cut pocket, and the table loses its collective mind.

Despite myself, something moves at the corner of my mouth, but I catch it before it becomes anything.

I map the room without thinking about it. The third exit on the left gets me to the yard fastest. The window above the sink opens outward. I noticed that the second I walked in. Gun riding on my hip. Three stakes tucked inside my jacket. Blade strapped at my wrist.

Every angle, every route, every possible problem runs through my head automatically, constant as breathing.

Not because I’m scared.

Because habits like this are the reason I’m still alive when a lot of people stronger than me ended up dead.

Ivy moves around the table, sliding plates in front of brothers without breaking stride while conversations and arguments roll around her. Drinks get handed off. Brothers twice her size shift automatically to make room for her without even realizing they’re doing it. The light catches in her hair every time she passes, flashes of rust and gold sliding through the noise and chaos of the dining room while she moves through it all as if she belongs at the center of it.

Maybe she does.

She reaches my side without making a thing out of it, sets a plate down near my elbow, then keeps moving like feeding a room full of monsters is just another part of her night.

“You look like the type who forgets to eat when she’s busy,” she says.

There’s no pity in it or fake softness either. Just an observation dropped on the table like she’s commenting on a simple truth.

I glance down at the plate, then back at her, but Ivy has already moved on, topping up drinks and sliding through the chaos of the dining room without expecting anything back.

That part throws me more than it should because my whole life has been built on trade. Information for information. Favors for favors. Every interaction eventually costs something.

Nobody has ever handed me food just because it’s dinnertime.

My fingers tighten slightly around the fork before I finally pick it up. From the far end of the table, Ash has one boot up on the edge of her chair, leaning back as though the room belongs to her. Her amber eyes find me across the noise and the movement and space between us, and she doesn’t look away. It’s the kind of look that strips you down and decides what you’re worth. I’ve had it turned on me before, mostly right before a fight. Here, it’s just an assessment. Thorough, unbothered, and completely direct.

I meet it, and don’t look away.

Something shifts in her expression, barely there, and she tips her chin in a single, slow nod. The way you acknowledge something real.

I go back to my dinner.

Rhett pushes food around his plate like it’s let him down in some deeply personal way. “Is this supposed to be chicken…” he says, “… or evidence of a crime?”

Bennett’s jaw tightens, like his patience has been running on fumes for a while now. “It’s perfectly adequate sustenance. Stop complaining.”

“I’m from hell. We have standards.”

Bennett stabs his fork into the meat with a force that is, objectively, excessive.

Ivy passes behind them both. She doesn’t break stride or look down. “Boys, eat or starve. I don’t care which.”

They both go quiet.

I stare at my plate for a second to keep my expression in order.

Luna drifts in from the kitchen with a pitcher, moving along the edge of the room. She doesn’t draw attention to herself. She’s just present, filling the shape of whatever space she occupies without making a point of it. I notice she appears near me when the table noise crests, when Maul throws his head back in a laugh that rattles the windows, when a bottle gets knocked and skids across the wood with a crack that my body wants to read as a weapon discharge. She doesn’t crowd me. She’s just there, keyed into something in me I didn’t know had a signal.

I notice it.

I don’t understand it yet.

Coil leans across the table at some point, his voice cutting low and direct through the noise, “What do you carry?”