Page 39 of Property of Scar

“I’m educating myself,” Rhett says, carrying himself like a scholar despite all evidence to the contrary. “Through experience.”

“You are…” Bennett agrees, “… experiencing how to be an idiot.”

“And you’re experiencing how to be a pretentious—”

My eyes come up, red, fully lit, and carrying the weight of five centuries behind them. My fangs drop a fraction, not enough to threaten, but enough to be visible in the low light, because sometimes the implication is more efficient than the action.

Rhett’s mouth closes.

“Finish that sentence, and I’ll have Thorn use you both as fertilizer. He’s been asking for nitrogen-rich material for the east garden beds… I’ve been looking for a reason to say yes.”

The silence that follows hangs there, thick and unimpressed.

Then, somewhere to my left, Rhett mutters under his breath, “Pretty sure threatening murder over grammar proves my point.”

Bennett hums thoughtfully. “Technically, that was vocabulary, not grammar.”

“I heard that,” I growl.

“Yeah,” Rhett shoots back immediately. “Figured you would, damn vamp hearing!”

“Didn’t really weaken the argument,” Bennett adds calmly.

From across the table, Roxy makes a sound that is unmistakably a laugh before she catches it behind her palm, pressing her knuckles against her mouth. Her shoulders shake as she looks up at me over the edge of her hand, eyes bright, and for a moment, she is incandescent with something that has nothing to do with magic and everything to do with finally fitting somewhere.

I look back down at my research, grumbling at the fact that these fucking prospects do my damn head in.

The familiar thing moves through my chest the way it always does. Not quite pain or longing. Something older than both, sitting just behind my ribs like an ember that refuses to die or give any heat.

This is what it was supposed to look like, something in me observes, quietly, from a distance I’ve spent three hundred and fifty years cultivating. This room, this hour, two people working side by side toward something that matters, and the sound of her laughing at something stupid.

Roxy’s laughter fades. The gold threads in her magic deepen, pulling harder at the text beneath her palms, and her expression shifts back into something careful and focused as she turns another page.

Then she goes still.

I feel it before she speaks.

Her magic changes pitch, the threads pulling taut, a subtle shift in the warmth of it, the way a fire changes when it hits something wet.

“Scar.” Her voice is different. Not frightened, but something more precise than fear. “His primary objective wasn’t power for himself. He wanted to build for someone. He wrote—” She stops. “He was obsessed with creating the perfect predator. Something that combined the vampire bloodline’s longevity and calculation with berserker rage as a weapon. Not a creature with both… a creature that could weaponize both on command.”

She looks up at me, and there’s something in her eyes I know well, like she’s just realized she’s standing at the edge of something much bigger than she thought. “The experiments were unspeakable, using unwilling subjects. He used blood rituals to force the merger of bloodlines, and when the subjects rejected the formula, he…” She can’t finish it. She shakes her head instead, and the gold threads of her magic retract slightly in protective instinct. “He kept going anyway.”

Rhett and Bennett have stopped shelving. I don’t look at them, keeping my eyes on the research in front of me and letting the silence carry the full weight of what she’s described, because silence is the only honest response to that kind of history.

“We’ll stop him, Scar.” Roxy’s voice is quiet, but there’s no hesitation in it. She reaches across the table, and her hand finds mine where it rests against the page, magic humming at the surface of her skin. “For her.”

For her.

I look back down at my research. That old feeling shifts in my chest again. There’s no clean word for it. It’s not pain, or regret, not even longing.

It’s something heavier than all of them.

It sits there like a dead thing that never fully stayed buried, refusing to disappear no matter how many years pass or how hard I try to carve it out of myself.

This is what it was supposed to look like, something in me observes, quietly, from a distance I’ve spent generations cultivating. This room, this hour, two people working side by side toward something that matters, and the sound of Roxy laughing at something stupid.

I knew someone who laughed like that once. Wild and unguarded, the kind of laugh that had no concern for how it sounded or who was listening. A berserker woman, fierce, golden, and so relentlessly, impossibly alive that even standing next to her felt like standing too close to a fire, blinding, scorching, and exactly where you wanted to be.