Page 76 of Property of Scar

She thanked me.

She fucking thanked me.

What if she was thanking me for ending Mordain’s work as much as her suffering?

What if she knew?

She knew she could never come back from the Frankenstein bullshit he did to her, and the only way out was death.

She wanted me with her at the end.

I have been punishing myself for killing her all this time…

But what I did to her was mercy.

I just never fucking knew it.

“But that was a long time ago,” I say, because it’s easier than answering her. “Long before I had any name worth keeping.”

“So then… how did you end up here?” Cali asks, after enough silence has passed that the question doesn’t feel like it’s chasing the last one. “With them. The Kings. That’s not exactly the natural next step for a grieving three-hundred-year-old vampire.”

I let out the faintest huff of amusement. “No. It wasn’t.” Then lean back against the counter, giving myself something to hold onto besides the conversation. “Fifty years after Astrid, a coalition of vampire lords moved against a cult that had been carving up supernaturals for parts and calling it research. I joined because old debts demanded it, not because of her. I told myself that, and I believed it. Burying myself in someone else’s war was easier than sitting still with grief I refused to bury myself in.

“We burned their stronghold. I watched it come down myself, believed their leader died in the wreckage same as everything else that was his. As far as I knew, that was a closed chapter, a monster I never had to think about again.” Something in my chest goes cold at the memory, though I can’t yet say why. “There were notes. Records. I burned a stack of them without reading them closely. Evidence, I told myself, nothing worth keeping. I didn’t think about it again for three hundred years.”

Cali is watching me with steady eyes.

“After that…” I continue, because it is easier to keep moving than to sit inside that particular thought, “… there was no coalition, no cause, no name that stuck to me longer than a season. Decades blurred into each other. I kept moving because stopping meant feeling something, and I had gotten very good at not feeling things. I don’t remember most of that era. I’m not sure I was fully present for it.”

“And then Raze?”

“And then Raze.” I allow myself something closer to a real smile this time. “I drifted into mountain territory he was still learning to hold, freshly exiled, still leashing whatever got him thrown out in the first place. We didn’t meet. We collided. It was a fight before it was ever an introduction, and somewhere in the middle of it, one of us took a hit meant for the other. Real. Costly. No time to think it through.”

“He patched you out of pity?”

“He patched me because I was owed it, and Raze doesn’t deal in anything else.” I shake my head. “He didn’t offer me comfort afterward. I wouldn’t have taken it if he had. He offered structure, rules… a code. Brothers who’d notice if I didn’t come home at night.” I meet her eyes, finally, and let her see the rest of it. “I didn’t take the patch because I wanted a family again. I took it because I recognized, better than most men could, exactly what a weapon looks like once it stops having a leash. I’d have become that. I think some nights I still could.”

Cali is quiet for a long moment. “That’s not nothing, you know. Choosing the leash on purpose.”

“It’s the only thing that ever worked on me,” I tell her. “Purpose, held by people who’d come looking if I didn’t answer. Everything before that was just momentum.”

She crosses her arms across her chest, and doesn’t fill the quiet that follows with anything at all. She just stays, present. Simply there.

It should feel like too much, all of it laid out in one night after centuries of keeping it filed away where no one could reach it.

It doesn’t.

It feels, for the first time in longer than I can accurately measure, like something has been set free rather than buried. I don’t know yet what it costs me, telling her the truth about the coalition, that I burned pages I never read, that I called a chapter closed I never actually finished.

Tonight, I only know that Cali listens as if it matters. And for the first time in so very long, I let someone else hold a piece of this instead of carrying all of it alone.

Chapter Eighteen

CALYPSO

The Next Day

The journal survived something it shouldn’t have.