Page 40 of Property of Scar

Her name was Astrid.

Three and a half centuries later, it still lands in me like a blade finding the same old wound. And I was the one who killed her.

That truth has lived inside me longer than most kingdoms survive, buried deep and locked down hard enough that I stopped allowing myself to think around it too closely. No details, memories, or reaching toward the shape of what happened that night.

Just the fact.

Astrid.

Dead by my hand.

And the silence I built around her afterward.

The gold threads in Roxy’s magic deepen, pulling harder at the text beneath her palms, and her expression shifts back into something careful and focused.

My radio crackles on the table beside the mug she brought me. Coil’s voice comes through, stripped of anything unnecessary, the way he always speaks when something requires immediate attention, “Scar… the docks. Customs is holding the Voss shipment. Third agent on rotation, and he’s not taking the usual arrangement. We need you here.”

“Stay on this,” I say to Roxy, and she nods without lifting her eyes from the page, her magic already threading deeper. I pick up my radio and jacket from the chair, roll my neck once, and look across the library to where Rhett and Bennett are both watching me, already tuned in to the fact that something better than shelving is coming.

“Put the books down, prospects,” I say. “You’re with me.”

***

I drive, they argue… this is the natural order of things.

“So what’s the play?” Rhett asks from the back, leaning forward between the seats with the enthusiasm of a hellhound who is deeply relieved to be doing something that might involve property damage and not shelving books. “Are we bribing or threatening? Because I want to know how dressed up to be, emotionally speaking, of course.”

“We’re negotiating,” Bennett says from the passenger seat, sounding like he’s had this conversation before and already knows how it ends. “Violence is a last resort.”

Rhett stares at the back of his head. “Since when?”

“Since I said so.”

“You don’t outrank me,” Rhett growls, as if the hierarchy has personally offended him. “We’re both prospects. We are literally on the exact same rung of the exact same ladder.”

“I outrank you morally.”

“That’s not a…” Rhett pauses. “That’s not even a real category.”

“It is in heaven.”

“We’re not in heaven, Bennett, but in a van that smells like Rhett’s emotional instability, heading to a dock at two in the morning to deal with a corrupt customs agent, and moral rank is not going to help us,” I state.

“It will help me,” Bennett serenely says. “I will feel better about what I’m doing, which will improve my performance, which will therefore—”

“You both outrank each other…” I groan, pulling the van into the dock lot, gravel spitting under the tires, the dark mouth of the waterfront opening up ahead of us with its smell of brine, rust, and the cold of a New Hampshire night that gets into everything, “… in shutting the fuck up.” I cut the engine. “We’re here.”

The dock lights throw long shadows across the containers ahead of us, yellow-white and industrial, and somewhere inside that maze of steel and salt water, something shifts just enough to stand out, a sound that doesn’t belong, a break in the rhythm, the faint edge of adrenaline riding the air.

Someone just made a mistake.

I slide out of the van, behind me, the doors open, and two prospects hit the gravel in sync.

Whatever is waiting in there thinks it still has options.

It does not.

Chapter Twelve