Page 70 of Property of Scar

There’s a beat of silence behind me that communicates, very clearly, that Scar is not a man who takes instruction easily.

“I’m fine,” he demands.

I pull open the cabinet above the sink and locate the first-aid kit by trained instinct, because hunters always find the kit first, always, before they find the bathroom, the light switch, or anything else. I set it on the counter and turn to look at him.

The slash across his ribs has soaked through his shirt completely, a dark stain spreading outward from his left side in the way that means it’s deeper than the fabric wants to admit. He’s standing in the center of the room with his arms slightly away from his body, the unconscious stance of managing pain by refusing to acknowledge it exists.

“You’re not fine,” I tell him. “Sit… down.”

He sits.

The chair at the small kitchen table takes his weight, and he leans back against it, jaw set, and I carry the kit across and pull the second chair around so I’m beside him rather than opposite. He watches me set out what I need with that measuring quality he has, the kind of attention that doesn’t miss detail. I’ve gotten used to it. Almost.

“Shirt,” I say.

He pulls it over his head without ceremony, and I don’t let my eyes linger. I thread the needle and focus on the wound, which is long and clean-edged along his left flank, deep enough that his accelerated healing hasn’t closed it yet. The tissue around it has already begun to knit at the edges, the way vampire physiology does when given half a chance, but this one needs help. This one needed help ten minutes ago.

“Those rogues were something else,” I mumble.

Scar grumbles under his breath, “Yeah, their fucking claws had some enhanced power to them… stopped me from healing faster than normal. Cut damn deep too.”

“I can see that…” I say. “This is going to pull.”

“I know what stitches feel like.”

“Five centuries of practice,” I murmur, and I hear something in the air that might be called a ghost of amusement.

I work carefully, the way I always work, each stitch placed with quiet precision, learned on myself first and only later on others. My hands move, following the line of the wound, and I feel his eyes on my face without looking up to confirm it. The weight of that attention sits differently against my skin than it did a week ago. It’s less like an assessment now, but more like something that doesn’t have a name.

I tie off the last stitch and reach for the gauze.

His cool fingers close around my wrist and rest against my pulse point. The contact stops me mid-reach in a way that nothing about my training prepared me for.

I look up, and he is already watching me. Firelight catches in those red eyes, turning them darker at the edges, and whatever is moving behind them isn’t something he’s putting words to.

Maybe he can’t.

Maybe he won’t.

Either way, I’m not doing it for him.

His gaze stays fixed on me in a way that makes it difficult to look anywhere else for too long.

His jaw tightens. Something held too close to the surface and too tightly controlled ever to be mistaken for weakness. “Why do you do this?” His voice is low, stripped of the careful architecture it usually carries. “Hunt alone. Risk your life as if it costs you nothing.”

The gauze is still in my hand. I slowly set it down on the table, the way you set something down when you need a moment before you answer, and you don’t want the person in front of you to know that’s what you’re doing.

The answer I usually give is functional because someone has to. Because the job doesn’t wait. Clean, correct, and thoroughly impenetrable. The words that come out instead are something else.

“My mother was human,” I say. “Mostly human, she was a descendant from a bloodline of witches, which is what gave me the dhampir gene. My father was a vampire who didn’t stay, which makes me whatever I am, but my mother… she was just a mortal. She had a garden with too many tomatoes. She laughed too loud at her own jokes.” I pick up the gauze again, just to have something to do with my hands. “I was twelve when a cult found us. A blood cult, not the Circle, different name, same belief… that something sacred lives in the act of taking a life and that the cost of it isn’t theirs to carry.” My throat does something I correct before it becomes visible. “She died in front of me. I was twelve feet away, and I couldn’t do anything.”

Scar’s hand is still around my wrist, and he hasn’t moved.

“The hunters who took me in after… they told me they were the answer to it. That they were the thing that stood between what happened to her and it happening to anyone else.” I press the gauze into place and smooth the tape down with my thumb. “For years, I believed that. I trained for it. I bled for it. I let them hollow out every soft part of me and call it discipline.”

My eyes lift to his. “And then I found out they were taking contracts. Killing innocents for money. Using the network they’d built to protect people as cover for something that made the things we hunted look moral.”

Something shifts in his expression. Not pity, but something older and more specific than that.