Page 75 of Property of Scar

The warehouse.

Mordain’s notes…

Mixing vampire blood with berserker blood—violent rages, paranoia, uncontrollable bloodlust.

Three hundred and fifty years.

Three and a half centuries, and the symptoms sitting in front of me line up with Astrid’s so perfectly it feels like the past reached across time and grabbed me by the throat.

For a second, I don’t move.

Not because I’m forcing myself to stay still.

Because something inside me has gone strangely quiet.

I’ve spent centuries building my control into something solid. Layer after layer, brick by brick. Every ugly thing locked away behind walls I trusted to hold because they always have.

I reach for that certainty now, and my hand closes on something different.

The foundation is still there.

But it shifts, just enough to matter.

Just enough to make my stomach tighten.

The feeling rolls through me hard because uncertainty isn’t something I’ve had much practice carrying. Not like this. Not where it counts.

And somehow that unsettles me more than anything I’ve heard tonight.

Astrid’s face is there before I can stop it.

Not as memory.

As recognition.

The way she looked right before it took her. The way I knew, with absolute clarity, that there was no fixing it, no saving her from what she was becoming.

The way I had to end it.

And something cold moves through me.

Something old.

Something I buried with her.

The thought doesn’t arrive slowly. It locks into place cleanly. And for the first time in five centuries…

I don’t know how to stop it.

What if it wasn’t the berserker curse?

What if it was him?

What if Mordain had her before I ever knew she was already gone?

My hand presses flat against my chest, while Cali watches me and doesn’t say another word. And somehow that is the most devastating mercy she could offer, because if she spoke right now, I don’t think I could answer her.

The thought blooms wide, terrible, and undeniable in the quiet of the room. I am simply inside it, unable to move, unable to contain it, immovable and controlled in the face of the possibility that everything I carried, every year of grief, every night I chose to keep this scar instead of letting it heal, every time I said her name in the dark and meant it as penance, has been built on an incomplete truth.