Page 46 of Property of Scar

Astrid drops to her knees in front of me, blood staining her mouth, her body shaking as she fights herself and loses ground with every second that passes. Her voice breaks when she speaks, raw and desperate in a way that cuts straight through everything else, “Don’t let me…” she chokes, her hands curling into the dirt as if she can hold herself together through force alone. “Don’t let me become…”

The rest never comes.

It doesn’t have to.

Guilt slams into me with crushing force, stealing the air from my lungs in a way that feels just as real now as it did then. The feeling has never dulled. Not once. Not in three hundred and fifty years. It lives in me exactly as it was the day I earned it, sharp and waiting.

The blade is in my hand.

I feel the weight of it, heavier than any weapon has a right to be, because it isn’t just steel. It is consequence. It is the line between what she was and what she is becoming.

She looks at me.

And for a single, brutal second, she is there.

Fully there.

Clear.

Present.

Herself.

Trust breaks through the madness in her eyes, and it guts me so completely I feel it split something open inside my chest.

You hesitated. The hollow doesn’t whisper it. It presses it into me, forces it into the space where doubt already lives.

You didn’t want to do it. My throat tightens, something raw catching there, because for half a second…

I didn’t.

And that half second stretches under the hollow’s influence, pulled thin and endless, made heavier than it ever was, until it feels like a failure instead of a moment.

You made her suffer.

No!

Not here.

Not now.

The refusal settles into me like iron driven deep. This is what five centuries teach you. Not speed or strength, it teaches you how to stand in the dark with something that knows exactly how to break you and not give it the satisfaction of watching you fall apart.

I drag it all back, every piece of it. The grief. The guilt. The memory of her blood on my hands. Still warm, still real. I take what the hollow is trying to twist, and I lock it down where it belongs.

I know what happened.

I know why.

And I will not let this thing rewrite it.

Using everything I have, I force my body to move. Step by step, I push back through the hold, the hollow raging now, denied what it wants, clawing at everything it has uncovered, trying to tear it open again.

The world outside my head comes back in fragments, Rhett shouting something I can’t quite make out, Bennett holding his line with a strain I can feel even from here, the dock lights overhead cutting through the dark in harsh strips of yellow.

But it keeps pressing.

Her blood on my hands.