Page 78 of Property of Scar

“No.” Rhett’s voice is stripped of everything sharp, nothing left but plain truth. “We should leave him the fuck alone.”

Then nothing. Just the hum of the clubhouse around us, and the three of us left in a room with a journal that has been keeping a secret for generations.

I glance at Scar, who clearly heard everything I just heard, too, but he is choosing to ignore it. So I shift my focus back to the journal, and I read the entry properly for the first time, pulling it into focus and making myself look at every word.

Subject A.

Berserker female.

Formula 12.

Temporary success, ultimate failure.

Subject eliminated by external party

before the final data was collected.

External party.

The air moves out of my lungs in a way I don’t entirely plan. I keep my face neutral by sheer force of will because falling apart is not on the table right now. Scar is the one who needs to be doing that, and he won’t, which means someone in this room has to stay steady.

But I know who Subject A is.

The scar across Scar’s face, jagged, old, and refused every chance to heal, chose to stay there like a monument to a night he’s never let go of. I know now what it marks. I know who left it. I know that he tracked her down, that he begged her to fight it, that she couldn’t, that she knew it was him at the end of it, and she thanked him.

She thanked him.

And this journal is telling me that what she was fighting wasn’t her own nature at all. It was built, perfected, and locked inside her by a dead man who wrote her name as a letter of the goddamn alphabet.

I watch Scar’s shoulders, and I don’t speak.

Roxy is watching him, too, and the grief on her face is soft, raw, and entirely unguarded. She rests her fingertips on the journal’s spine again and turns pages slowly, giving him time she can’t name aloud without making it worse. Three of us are standing in a room where the silence is carrying so much that it’s almost audible.

Then Roxy goes still. “There’s another entry.” Her voice is careful and measured. “Cross-referenced in the margin. The Seelie Court, it specifically mentions them providing magical wards for the laboratory.”

The Seelie Court.

I turn that over, feeling its edges, understanding what it means for where we need to go next. The fae and Mordain’s work connected through official channels, not fringe contact. Sanctioned. There’s a thread there that runs deeper than we knew, and pulling it will require more than we have.

I watch Scar process, watch him take the grief and fold it down into something he can work with, because that is what he does, since he’s been doing it for hundreds of years, and the memory is absolute even when everything else is falling apart. His jaw tightens. His hands unfold from his arms and settle flat on the table.

The door opens, and Coil steps through without knocking, which is not unusual. Coil rarely knocks—he moves like water, appears like something that was always there. He reads the room in a single reptilian sweep of those gold-slitted eyes, finds Scar’s expression, and files whatever question he had away for later. He’s good at that. Efficient in all the ways that matter.

“There’s a deal going down tomorrow night,” he says. “Artifact exchange. High value, private buyer. The kind of transaction that has the Seelie Court’s fingerprints on it from three layers out.”

The silence that follows has a different quality than the one before it. Something is calculated in it.

Scar lifts his eyes from the journal, and the grief is still there. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just moves behind something older, five centuries of knowing how to weaponize loss into forward motion.

“A deal,” he repeats, and there is something in his voice now that I recognize. That I have watched him use across the barrel of impossible situations. Something steady, deliberate, and entirely ferociously purposeful. “Then we’re going to intercept it. And we’re going to use it to get in front of the Seelie Court.” He pauses. “If they helped Mordain build his laboratory, then they know where he ran to… and they’re going to tell us.”

I hold his gaze across the table for a moment.

He holds mine back.

It looks like a three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old wound has been ripped open and closed again, but not the way it should have been.

He looks like he’ll push through it and get to work anyway.