Page 45 of Property of Scar

“Crate, Rhett!”

I step into the compressed space, into the thick, waiting dark. I look at the thing wearing the dock worker’s face, at what sits just beneath the borrowed skin, and I lower the walls I keep around my mind the way you open a window, only as far as I intend.

It hits me like a blade driven clean between the ribs.

The hollow pours into the gap I’ve made, a presence that feels older than anything that should still exist, its appetite pressing in from all sides as it forces its way through my mind. It doesn’t search the way a man would search. It spreads, seeping into every fracture line, every place that has ever carried weight.

It finds my grief.

It finds my loneliness.

And then it finds…

Her.

The shift is immediate and violent, the world around me dropping away as something deeper takes hold, something that lives beneath memory, thought, and reason.

Snow crunches under my boots with brutal clarity. The air burns cold in my lungs. The metallic scent of blood sits thick and suffocating at the back of my throat.

Astrid stands in front of me, and she is already slipping.

Her breath tears out of her like something is ripping it free, her chest rising and falling too fast, too uneven, her eyes too bright, too wide, that wild, uncontained edge already taking over. Her teeth bare at me, not in a smile, not in anything that belongs to the woman I knew, but in something feral, something that looks at me and sees a threat instead of the man she once trusted.

My chest tightens, not with panic, but with recognition that cuts deeper than anything clean.

I know this moment.

I know exactly where this ends.

No!

I force the word down through everything the hollow is trying to drag to the surface, but it presses harder, curious, feeding on the fracture it has found, pushing into it with intent.

Astrid’s hands fist in my shirt, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise, shaking me with a strength that doesn’t belong to her anymore. “Do something.”

The memory doesn’t sit still. It drags me into it, forces me to feel the heat of her skin, the desperation in her grip, the impossible weight of knowing there is no version of this where I save her.

You were too late. The thought slides in smooth and cold, not mine, and yet it lands exactly where it knows it will do the most damage.

I lock my jaw against it, but the hollow is already deeper.

A laugh tears out of her, broken, followed by a snarl that makes the sound into something unrecognizable. She moves, faster than she should, and her claws rake across my face. Pain explodes, sharp and immediate, tearing through me with enough force to fracture my vision.

It is not memory. It is happening again, fresh, brutal, and unavoidable, my body reacting before I can stop it.

You let her get that close.

The voice again, colder now, certain in a way that makes it feel like truth.

I chose to keep the scar.

I chose to carry it.

And now it burns like it was carved into me only seconds ago.

“Scar!” Rhett’s voice tries to reach me, but it comes through fractured, distant, like it’s fighting its way through water.

The hollow doesn’t care. It pushes deeper, into the place where grief doesn’t stay clean, where it twists into something heavier, something that never softened with time.