Page 77 of Property of Scar

You can see it in the leather, in the way the edges have tightened, in the spine that holds just a little too rigidly, like it remembers the moment it almost came apart.

Roxy lowers it onto the table with both hands, taking her time, treating it with the kind of careful respect people usually reserve for explosives.

A heavy silence settles across the room while everyone watches.

After where we found it, nobody seems interested in tempting fate.

She spreads her fingers over the cover, and I watch the magic move through her, the faint shimmer that crawls down from her palms and threads itself along the edges of the burned pages like fingers finding the shape of something ruined. It’s quiet work. It surprises me how quiet her magic is, especially when I imagine what it’d be capable of if she ever unleashed it.

The first page curls open.

Then another.

“Some of it’s gone for good,” she murmurs, her brows drawn tight, concentrating. “But the deeper entries, the ink sat long enough that the paper remembers.” She glances up at me briefly, and I can read the tension in the corners of her eyes. “This might take a minute.”

Scar stands at the far end of the table with his arms crossed and his jaw set, watching her work with the focused stillness that I’ve learned, only recently, only reluctantly, is not actually calm. It’s something that goes in the opposite direction entirely. The sort of absolute stillness that exists in the moment before something breaks.

I stay on his periphery, not close enough to crowd him, but close enough to catch it if it does.

Roxy’s magic draws another page back from the dark.

Then another.

Rhett leans over her shoulder before anybody can stop him, which is entirely in character. His amber eyes track the emerging text while one hand braces on the table, head tilted as he studies the symbols. Shadows still cling to his knuckles in thin strands. “Subject A,” he reads, and the two words land in the room with an odd, flat weight. “That’s freaking ominous.”

Bennett closes his eyes briefly, as if he’s practicing extraordinary patience for very little reward. “Show some respect. Someone died.”

“I know someone died!” Rhett straightens without moving away. “I’m just saying, if you’re going to document your experiments on living beings, at least give them real names. Subject A is plain lazy.”

“That’s what you’re focusing on?”

“I’m a hellhound. I have a professional appreciation for the proper documentation of suffering… it’s not unreasonable.”

The silence that follows those words lands hard and not the ordinary kind. This one comes from Scar’s side of the table and spreads outward from there.

When I look at him, something in my chest tightens.

The same thing it’s been doing for the last two weeks, every time my attention catches on him when it shouldn’t. His face has gone still, but not with the cold control he usually wears. Not the careful restraint he carries into meetings or the lethal focus that settles over him before a fight.

Whatever this is, it sits deeper.

Darker.

Like something old just got dragged too close to the surface.

His jaw is locked so tight it could crack stone. The muscle there jumps once. Then again. His red eyes stay fixed on the journal, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks like a man fighting to keep hold of something instead of a man who already has.

“Both of you.” The words come out quietly. Dangerously quiet, the kind of quiet that makes you pay attention. “Out. Now!”

Rhett turns and looks at Scar’s face. Whatever he sees there strips every bit of the smartassery right off him, and that alone, the absence of it, the sudden, uncanny silence, tells me everything. Rhett glances at Bennett, and Bennett is already moving. Neither of them says a word on the way out. The door closes behind them with a soft, deliberate click that is louder somehow than a slam would have been.

For a moment, I can hear them in the hallway, the low murmur of their voices through the wall.

“That was his lover, idiot.” Bennett’s voice is quiet and certain.

“Yeah…” Rhett pauses, “… I figured.”

“Should we—”