Page 83 of Property of Scar

She’s already found the exits and already decided what she’d do if this place turned hostile. Her hand stays clear of her weapon, but she’s thought through the draw a dozen times already.

I know because I’d have done the same thing.

Behind us, Raze and Roxy follow, and I feel the shift in the Court’s atmosphere. The fae watching us from the outer corridors aren’t simply curious. There is something older in the way their gaze lingers, something that has been waiting to settle into a decision, and the decision is about Raze.

They know him.

The dragon who almost sent the Prince’s realm into his dragon’s abyss. Who walked into Seelie territory, took what belonged to him, and walked out again without asking permission. That story has had time to travel, and it has, because a young noble near the outer corridor tracks Raze with a stillness that doesn’t belong on anyone’s face unless the emotion underneath it is something that requires managing. The silver crest at his collar catches the light—the prince’s household.

One of his.

Raze notices.

Raze’s hand rests at the small of Roxy’s back as we walk. The kind of contact that happens so naturally it barely seems conscious anymore. There is a certainty there that runs deeper than possession. Deeper than display. It speaks of something settled long ago, something tested and proven enough that neither of them feels the need to question it anymore.

Roxy carries on without acknowledging it.

Raze probably isn’t thinking about it either.

Still, I notice.

So does everyone else.

The corridor begins to open out ahead of us, the architecture shifting as we move deeper into the space, widening into something that feels less like a constructed room and more like a place that decided to exist this way long before anyone thought to question it. Living structures climb upward in slow, deliberate spirals, branches twisting into vaulted shapes that shouldn’t hold and yet do, pale stone threading through them in clean, intentional lines that draw the eye forward, whether you want them to or not.

Toward her.

We don’t slow down, and no one tells us to.

We’re being watched.

Not just by the guards posted along the corridor. The fae lining the outer walkways are watching, too, their attention following us with the same focus you’d see from predators tracking movement through the trees.

Nobody stares or whispers, they merely… watch.

Something is unsettling about it because it doesn’t feel like curiosity. It feels like recognition. Like we’re stepping through a story the fae have heard before, and they are waiting to see if this version ends any differently than the last one did.

Ruckus moves as though he belongs here, his pace unbroken, his posture unchanged, and that alone tells me more than anything else in this place.

Roxy doesn’t hesitate either, but there’s a subtle shift in her that I wouldn’t have caught if I wasn’t looking for it, something more contained in the way she carries herself, more aware, like she understands exactly where we are and what it costs to stand in it.

I fall into step with them, matching their pace without needing to adjust, my focus fixed ahead while the rest of my attention breaks off and tracks the details automatically. Entry points, sightlines, the placement of bodies that don’t present as threats until you notice the way they hold themselves, watch, and don’t move.

All of it matters.

But none of it will matter if this goes the way it could.

Chapter Twenty

SCAR

The throne arrives, the space gradually resolving around it as we move forward, as though the entire structure has been building toward this point from the moment we stepped inside, and we’re only now catching up to that design. Living thorns rise from the ground in slow, deliberate arcs, forming something that appears organic until you look closer and realize the precision behind it, the control in every curve, every angle placed exactly where it needs to be.

The queen sits at the center of it, not elevated for effect, but because the room is built around her and always has been.

I’ve heard about Queen Titania for five centuries. Stories, warnings, fragments of accounts from those who walked into her Court and walked out again, and from those who didn’t.

None of it translates cleanly to this.