Page 47 of Property of Scar

Her body going still.

That last look burned into me in a way that will never fade.

You could have saved her.

My steps falter, the weight of it threatening to drag me under, but I force myself forward, refusing to give it even that.

The scar burns, not pain, but something chosen, something earned—a reminder I have never allowed to fade.

I carry it.

I own it.

And I keep moving.

Because if I stop, if I let even a fraction of this take hold…

I will not come back from it.

And I do not break.

The cold bite of steel meets my hands, real in a way nothing inside my head is.

For half a second, everything holds.

Then the hollow reacts.

It doesn’t release me willingly. The force of it rips through me like something being dragged out through bone, a violent suction that wrenches at everything it had sunk into, clawing its way free of my mind, nerves, and spine. It takes with it heat, pressure, and something deeper that leaves me hollowed out in its wake.

My body locks against it, muscles seizing as the sensation spikes, like my insides are being turned inside out. My vision fractures at the edges, the world stuttering as the thing is forced back, inch by brutal inch, through a space it was never meant to fit through.

It resists.

I feel it cling.

Feel it try to anchor itself in the places it already touched, in the grief it found, in the memory it tried to carve open.

Astrid…

Her face flashes, not as memory, but as something suspended in the space between, close enough to reach. Clear, whole, and untouched by what came after.

My hand lifts before I can stop it.

Not much, barely a shift. A fraction of movement that no one else would see.

But I feel it.

The pull.

Three hundred and fifty years, and it is still there, buried under discipline, distance, and everything I have built to survive her loss. The instinct to reach. To take one step forward instead of back. To choose her, just once, without consequence.

For a single, dangerous second…

I almost do.

The hollow tightens around that hesitation, sensing it, feeding on it, trying to turn that fraction into something irreversible.

Stay.