Page 69 of Property of Scar

Then the heat. A wave of it rolls outward, brutally chasing us across the open ground. The pressure follows, a solid wall that catches us mid-stride and lifts.

My feet leave the ground, and for a split second, there’s nothing under me, nothing to push against, the force ripping momentum out from under us and turning it sideways. I twist midair, my grip on her tightening as I turn my body into the impact, taking the worst of it as we hit the ground hard and roll, gravel tearing under us as we skid.

The blast rushes past—heat, wind, followed by debris—then silence crashes in behind it.

I hit the asphalt on my side and roll, come up already reaching, already checking, and find Cali four feet away on her hands and knees in the gravel, head down, breathing.

Seeing that Cali is okay, I turn… and the warehouse is gone.

For a long, suspended moment, neither of us speaks.

The warehouse burns behind us, orange and ferocious, sending sparks and black smoke against the sky—Mordain’s failsafe. Whoever came back here, they were never meant to leave with what they found.

My hands, when I reach for her, are shaking. I turn her face toward me with two fingers at her jaw and read the damage, the bruising already darkening at her throat, the gash at her temple where the wall caught her, the way she’s holding her ribs on the left side with an effort so practiced she probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.

The journal is still in her jacket.

She got it out.

“You could’ve died.” The words come out without the careful structure I normally build around everything I allow myself to say. They land raw, stripped of everything except the thing they mean.

Cali looks up at me, while the fire throws gold and shadow across her face, but her eyes stay locked on mine, steady and unflinching. There’s no guard in them this time, at least not much of one. Just something raw enough to catch me off balance. Something I’ve only ever seen in passing before, buried beneath the walls she keeps firmly wrapped around herself.

Her gaze moves across my face the same way she works a scene, picking through details, following evidence, looking for the truth hiding underneath the surface.

Whatever she finds makes something shift in her, and it is just enough to make my chest tighten. And the look she gives me after that is a hell of a lot more dangerous than a weapon.

“So could you,” she says.

The words land clean with no edge or accusation.

Just fact.

I should let it end there, but I don’t. My gaze stays on her, tracking the shift in her expression, the way something quieter settles where the fight used to be, something that doesn’t belong in a moment like this and yet refuses to leave.

Five centuries of control, and this is what unsettles it.

Not the fight.

Not the blood.

Her.

She watches me like she knows that.

And that’s the most unsettling thing of all.

Chapter Sixteen

CALYPSO

The stairs creak under my weight, and I don’t have the energy to care. The safe house sits above one of the Kings’ bars, a narrow apartment that smells like old timber and cigarette smoke pressed into the walls over decades. When Scar pushes the door open with his shoulder, it gives with the grudging protest of wood that isn’t used to being opened in a hurry. I move past him into the low light, my ribs reminding me with every breath that the left wall of that warehouse had opinions about making contact with my spine.

I set the journal on the kitchen counter.

My hands are still steady. They’re always steady. It’s the rest of me that’s quietly negotiating with the adrenaline crash, the way it moves through the body like a tide pulling out, leaving everything cold and heavy in its wake.

“Sit,” I say, without turning around.