Page 74 of Property of Scar

I take a reflexive breath, not necessary considering I don’t need to breathe. “She hit me with a war axe so hard it took three days to heal properly, and when I came back for her, she laughed at me.” The corner of my mouth does something without my permission. “Not mockery. Pure, unguarded delight…” I pause. “I’d never encountered anything like her.”

Astrid, mid-battle, golden hair matted and all over the place, blood on her teeth, laughing.

“She was wild the way storms are wild. Not destruction, a kind of living force. More present in one moment than most things I’ve encountered in five centuries. She woke up joyful. She fought as if she loved it because she genuinely did. She had this way of making even the ugliest parts of existence feel like something worth being present for.”

My jaw tightens. “The change started four years after our love blossomed, in 1676… it began with an insatiable temper. Small things at first, a rage that took slightly too long to pass, an edge in her eyes after a fight that hadn’t been there before. I thought it was her nature… she was a berserker, after all.”

I force myself to hold the memory still, not to flinch away from it. “Some of her kind carry a madness in their blood. A curse that takes them if the bloodlust goes untended too long. I’d seen it before, and told myself that was all it was.”

I told myself that because the alternative was worse.

“By the time the innocents were dead, I’d already spent six months convincing myself I was imagining it.”

The words land in the room, heavy and blunt, but Cali doesn’t flinch.

“I tracked her for two weeks. Found her in a burning village in the highlands. She was still herself, underneath it. I could see it, flashes of her surfacing through something else that had taken root in her, something that wore her face but moved like a fever, like something that had gotten in and wouldn’t come back out.”

My hands are pressed flat against my thighs. Hard. “I begged her. I’m not a man who begs. I got down in that burning snow, and I told her to fight it, that I knew she was still in there, that she was stronger than whatever this was.”

Pain ripples through me at the memory.

“She looked at me.” My voice drops. “She knew who I was. She knew what I was asking. And she… she just couldn’t fight the rage. She couldn’t even to stop herself from trying to come after me.”

The silence closes around that sentence.

“So, I had to choose. And I could see behind those rabid eyes, there was a small part of my Astrid in there begging for it to end, so… I ended it.”

Cali’s breath shifts, not a gasp, just a quiet change in rhythm, there and gone.

My hand rises without thought, fingers finding the ridge of scar tissue that runs the length of my face, tracing it the way I’ve traced it ten thousand times in the last three and a half centuries. Always there. Always the same. A line of raised flesh that I have refused to let my healing take, refused every time my body tried to erase it.

“She gave me this scar during the struggle. She was fighting on two fronts, against me and against whatever had taken root inside her.” My fingers drop. “When it was done, I held her while she died.”

The room becomes very quiet, and my throat closes around the next part, but I don’t let it stop me. “She knew it was me. She knew what I’d done and why…” I pause, letting the memory flood through my thoughts. “She thanked me on her last breath.”

Two words.

Centuries of weight underneath them.

My voice doesn’t break, but it comes very close. Close enough that I feel it, the internal fracture, the hairline crack in something I keep extremely precisely sealed, and for a single unguarded moment, it is there in the open between us, visible, unavoidable, mine.

I don’t look at Cali. I keep my eyes on the splintered floor and let the silence stretch, holding it without rushing to fill it.

Cali doesn’t offer me a platitude. She leaves the space untouched, no hand reaching for mine, no easy reassurances about fault or right decisions, none of the things people say when grief shows up uninvited. She simply sits with it, with me. Quiet, present, and unafraid of what the room holds.

And then, low and careful, she says, “Maybe it wasn’t her fault.” The words find me before I’m ready for them. “The madness.” She’s thinking while she speaks, and I can hear the shape of it, the careful way she’s building toward something she’s not sure I can handle. “If something got into her, something planted, something deliberate… maybe she wasn’t cursed?” She meets my eyes when I finally raise them to hers. “Maybe someone did this to her.”

I don’t answer.

My gaze stays on hers, but my attention slides sideways, catching on the idea before I can stop it.

It doesn’t settle.

It sticks.

And that alone is enough to change my feelings.

The lab.